Justin Clemens

Jacques Lacan and the other side of psychoanalysis : reflections on Seminar XVII

This collection is the first extended interrogation in any language of Jacques Lacans Seminar XVII . Originally delivered just after the Paris uprisings of May 1968, Seminar XVII marked a turning point in Lacan’s thought; it was both a step forward in the psychoanalytic debates and an important contribution to social and political issues. Collecting important analyses by many of the major Lacanian theorists and practitioners, this anthology is at once an introduction, critique, and extension of Lacan’s influential ideas. The contributors examine Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, his critique of the Oedipus complex and the superego, the role of primal affects in political life, and his prophetic grasp of twenty-first-century developments. They take up these issues in detail, illuminating the Lacanian concepts with in-depth discussions of shame and guilt, literature and intimacy, femininity, perversion, authority and revolt, and the discourse of marketing and political rhetoric. Topics of more specific psychoanalytic interest include the role of objet a , philosophy and psychoanalysis, the status of knowledge, and the relation between psychoanalytic practices and the modern university. Contributors . Geoff Boucher, Marie-Helene Brousse, Justin Clemens, Mladen Dolar, Oliver Feltham, Russell Grigg, Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, Dominique Hecq, Dominiek Hoens, Eric Laurent, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Jacques-Alain Miller, Ellie Ragland, Matthew Sharpe, Paul Verhaeghe, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic

Lacan Deleuze Badiou

Presents a critical intervention into the key conceptual dissensions between contemporary Continental philosophys three most influential thinkers. The writings of Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou stand at the heart of contemporary thought. While the collective corpus of these three figures contains a significant number of references to each others work, these are often simply critical, obscure, or both. Lacan Deleuze Badiou guides academics working philosophy, psychoanalysis and critical theory through the sensitive moments in their respective work and identifies the passages, connections and disjunctions that underlie the often superficial statements of critique, indifference or accord. The first book to examine Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou together; reconstructs a fundamental conceptual history of Badiou, Deleuze and Lacans influences and intellectual context; it identifies and examines the key themes in contemporary European thought: the event, time and truth and shows how Deleuze and Badiou have followed and contravened the Lacanian intervention without reverting to pre Lacanian positions.

A Note on Psychoanalysis and the Crime of Torture

Torture and the legitimate powers of the state - why are psychoanalysts involved - torture can be seen as an information gathering device - psychoanalysis may play a role in the creation of information gathering coercion techniques.

Relations with concrete others (or, how we learned to stop worrying and love the Berlin Wall)

I MEET EIJA-RIITTA Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer – to all intents and purposes a typical middle-aged woman living in the small village of Liden in northern Sweden. The name, however, may have already alerted some readers to the fact that Eija-Riitta is not your ordinary Swedish woman, since she claims to have been married to the Berlin Wall since 1979. Perhaps it is best to hear the story straight from her (or at least, straight from her website):

Flipping Out: Avatars and Identity

This chapter focuses on the avatar as the mediating device between real and virtual spaces. The avatar has become the key technology through which this interplay is organized and experienced by organizing our relationship between spaces, which are simultaneously “real” and “virtual.” It facilitates this relationship through multiple functions; it is a mode of identification, a vector of the users agency, and an in-world representative of the user. The role of the avatar is analyzed using the concepts of focalization, localization, integration, and programming. Together, these concepts form an operational framework for understanding the complex form of the avatar, which can take on a multiplicity of forms, both within the screen environment and in the “real world.”

Posthumous News: The Afterlives of Georges Perec

Georges Perec is considered one of the most significant twentieth century writers. While perhaps best known for his first breakthrough novel Things and his monumental Life A Users Manual and perhaps his involvement in the Oulipo group, over the course of his writing career Perec produced, in Alison James’s words, ‘a body of work that is astonishing in its breadth and originality’. Perec’s stated ambition was to ‘write every kind of thing that it is possible for a man to write’, from acrostics and palindromes, to crosswords and revealing parodies of academic journal articles. The sheer diversity of Perec’s own output and the richness and insight of many of his non-fiction essays has provided scholars, writers and artists with a veritable toolbox of ideas for adaptation and wider application. This chapter gives a brief account of Perec’s life and extraordinary literary output. It develops the argument that Perec was, in key respects, ahead of his time and that many of his literary experiments were prescient in the way that they speak to and shed significant light on a range of contemporary issues and debates.

Bentham, torture, modernity

Abstract In this essay, I examine the relatively little-known and commented-upon writings of Jeremy Bentham regarding the potentially beneficial uses of torture in a utilitarian frame. If, following Michel Foucault’s extraordinarily influential work on Bentham’s panopticism, the motifs of governmental surveillance, practical intervention into mass behaviours, and institutional diagrams have become some of the crucial themes of sociological and historical studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these themes do not quite touch—for a number of reasons discussed below—the new sense that Bentham gives to torture. Moreover, Bentham does so precisely because his reasoning regarding the development of the panopticon reveals a certain limit to that dispositif, a limit at which its own logic is threatened; Bentham, accordingly, retreats that limit according to an ingenious reapplication of his utilitarian logic. In reconstructing Bentham’s singular dialectic of panopticism/torture, this essay proposes that it has further fundamental historical effects, necessarily complicating received aspects of “modernity”, embedding the discussion of Bentham in our own post-9/11 context.

Rochester’s Libertine Poetry as Philosophical Education

Whatever the interminable discussions regarding the true meaning and import of Hobbes’ political philosophy, one key question it poses to post-Restoration society is this: if the state is indeed an artificial man that requires the sacrifice of a natural portion of our being to enter, what—beyond pure violence and doctrine to shape the drive to self-preservation—is capable of holding it together? If bodies are themselves composites, refashioned and maintained by the material quest for pleasure and vainglory, what parts must be sacrificed to polity, and what happens to those parts necessarily excised in becoming part of a polity? These questions precipitate a crisis in the thought, experience, and acts of individuals. Libertinism is one of the attempted solutions to this crisis. It is, moreover, a paradoxical solution that, in explicitly exacerbating the aporias of materialism—that is, in literally digging its own grave—offers new possibilities for embodied action that are taken up by subsequent thinkers, anticipating (if in a wittier and less prolix fashion) the writings around ‘sensibility’ from Sterne to Sade. This article argues that the acts and writings of John Wilmot (1647–1680), the Earl of Rochester, exemplary libertine, poet and courtier, show him to be a crucial negative precursor for the theories of ‘sensibility’ that dominated the following century.

What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images W.J.T. Mitchell

(2008). What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images W.J.T. Mitchell. The Journal of Modern Craft: Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 431-434.