Colin Wright

Centrifugal Logics: Eagleton and Spivak on the Place of 'Place' in Postcolonial Theory

In this paper, I contest the analytic relevance of the term ‘eurocentrism’ to the contemporary phenomenon of globalisation by examining a distinction between ‘place’ and ‘space’. The clash of these two concepts is explored in a controversial review of Gayatri Spivaks latest book by Terry Eagleton. I argue that Eagletons understanding of Marxist theory implies an intellectual placed at the centre of a sphere of cognitive sovereignty, and that his critique of Spivak consists in suggesting that, by removing herself from this centre, she has rendered her own discourse unintelligible. In contrast, Spivak, as (in part) a poststructuralist, emphasises space over place. I discuss the gains and losses – as well as the dangers – involved in such an emphasis, and conclude by insisting that poststructuralism cannot be a universally applicable meta-theory, but is in fact ideally suited to attesting to the place in which it finds itself.

Resurrection and Reaction in Alain Badiou: Towards an Evental Historiography

Abstract Alain Badiou’s theory of the event has often been characterised as ahistorical in its focus on the punctual irruption of radical novelty. Not only does the event break completely with the past, but its aleatory character means that historical discourse cannot account for its occurrence, even retrospectively. This article complicates this putative opposition between the event and history in Badiou’s thought in four interrelated ways. Firstly, it situates the question of history in the broader context of his early Maoist period, where a crucial distinction between ideological history and dialectical historicity is already discernible. Secondly, it emphasises the way in which, even in the work that divorces the event from history most violently (Being and Event), the event remains absolutely conditioned by this historicity. Thirdly, it draws upon Badiou’s latest major work, Logiques des mondes, where the question of history returns in the form of a new concept, ‘evental resurrection’. Fourthly and most speculatively, the article then extrapolates from this concept of ‘resurrection’ and from Badiou’s own mode of philosophical exposition in order to adumbrate a form of evental historiography which, in contrast to the pacifying effects of ‘statist’ or official history, is faithful to the radical implications of a truth.

Badiou’s Axiomatic Democracy Against Cultural Politics: A Jamaican Counter‐Example

Abstract Alain Badiou is a fierce critic of State‐based parliamentary democracy and the supposedly radical democracy that fails to disentangle itself from the Statist logic of representation. This article traces Badiou’s alternative proposal of a generic democracy based upon the prescription of an axiom of equality. However, the article then challenges an important consequence of this axiomatic democracy: the apparent disjuncture between politics and culture. It does so by re‐describing the productive interface between the Rastafari movement and roots reggae music in Jamaica in the 1970s and beyond as, in Badiou’s own terms, a ‘configuration’ that reveals the possibility of what is termed an ‘evental culture’. By reading Rastafarian reggae as an example of a generic radical democracy with an explicitly cultural politics at its core, it is argued that the outlines of what has hitherto been an out‐and‐out oxymoron – a ‘Badiouian cultural studies’ – are provided.

Lacan’s Cybernetic Theory of Causality: Repetition and the Unconscious in Duncan Jones’ Source Code

Wright’s chapter outlines how Lacan’s early engagement with cybernetics and game theory informed his psychoanalytic theory of causality. At times, Lacan seems close to a posthumanism avant la lettre in his emphasis on the machinic or combinatorial aspects of the psyche. However, through a Lacanian interpretation of Duncan Jones’ Sci-fi film Source Code (2011)—in which the main character’s cyborg status allows for an exploration of posthuman themes—Wright argues that Lacan stresses the temporality of desire and the act in human subjectivity, rather than machinic repetition. In this way, Lacan’s theory of causality contributes to a critical posthumanism attuned to the fantasies that animate both celebratory and dystopian transhumanism.

Perversion and the Law: From Sade to the ‘Spanner Case’ and Beyond

Interrogating the relation between the law and changing notions of perversion, in society and in Lacanian theory, Colin Wright observes that modernity is marked by a progressive intertwining of perversion and justice. Through the problematic of the status of the concepts of consent and harm in liberal law he demonstrates that the ‘crime’ of ‘occasioning bodily harm’ between consenting adults at the centre of the so-called ‘Spanner case’ reveals a paradoxical attempt to govern the body of pleasure by protecting it against the risk of unpleasure, while demonstrating the impossibility of legislating for the body of jouissance that enjoys beyond the pleasure principle. Demonstrating that the alleged crime never took place did not prevent a guilty verdict being given, but guilty of what, precisely?

Dr Fanon on colonial narcissism and anti-colonial melancholia

Frantz Fanon is rightly known as a theorist of anti-colonial resistance and decolonisation who put his ideas into practice as a member of the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) during the Algerian war of independence. He is justifiably received as a major figure within so-called Third World Marxism and considered a cornerstone of postcolonial theory. However, what is often forgotten or passed over far too quickly is his training but also innovative practice as a psychiatrist, despite the central role it plays in his critique of the pathogenic effects of racism and colonial oppression. For far from the DSM-dominated mainstream psychiatry of today, Fanon’s clinical as well as critical thinking was shaped by a strand of French psychiatry itself increasingly radicalised in the 1950s. At Saint-Alban in central France for example, Fanon worked under Francois Tosquelles, himself a militant veteran of both the Spanish Civil War and then the French resistance, whose development of a ‘socio-therapeutic’ approach was an explicitly political project that paved the way for the (somewhat inaccurately called) ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement that exploded in the 1960s. Fanon went on to apply Tosquelles’ socio-therapeutic approach in Algeria, although its limitations in the colonial context contributed to his resignation as a psychiatrist, and immersion in the independence movement.

Introduction: Mapping Perversion in the Contemporary World

A child is seated on a throne, imagining that he is king and master of all he beholds; at the same time his unconscious fantasy appears on a screen, but in another place. With no hint of subtlety, this is followed by the title of Freud’s famous text ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, flashed across the screen. This emblematic scene from Todd Haynes’ short film Dottie Gets Spanked (1993)—deeply rooted in popular culture, with its nod to I Love Lucy and the mesmerising power of the mass media—succeeds in conveying a profound equivocation with regard to the place of conscious and unconscious fantasy, transgressive desire, sexual identity, and between the affects of humour and pathos. The film’s creation as such, as well as its provocative content, points in different ways to the on-going problematic of perversion in contemporary life, as also to the central place of psychoanalysis in that problematic. It is on this ‘other scene’ of perversion today that this book attempts to shine a light.