Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy

Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy
Author: Justin Clemens
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2013-05-13
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748678956

Love, hate, slavery, torture, addiction and death - as this book shows, only psychoanalysis can speak well of such matters. Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an untouchable project, caught between science and poetry, medicine and hermeneutics. This unsettled, unsettling status has recently induced the philosopher Alain Badiou to characterise psychoanalysis as an 'antiphilosophy', that is, as a practice that issues the strongest possible challenges to thought. Justin Clemens takes up the challenge of this denomination here, by re-examining a series of crucial psychoanalytic themes: addiction, fanaticism, love, slavery and torture. Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today.

Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy

Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy
Author: Justin Clemens
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2013-05-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748678964

Justin Clemens examines psychoanalysis under the rubric of 'antiphilosophy': a practice that offers the strongest possible challenges to thought. Drawing on the work of Badiou, Freud, Lacan, Zizek and Agamben, he examines the relationships of humans to dr

Lacan

Lacan
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 351
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231548419

Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badiou’s seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou’s year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking. In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan’s theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the “anti-philosopher,” a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou’s own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou’s more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.

Surplus

Surplus
Author: A. Kiarina Kordela
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2008-01-03
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780791470206

Maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the line of thought from Spinoza to Marx.

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher
Author: Alfred I. Tauber
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2010-07-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400836921

Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.

Sex and Nothing

Sex and Nothing
Author: Alejandro Cerda-Rueda
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-05-08
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0429918925

From its etymological roots, sex is related to a scission, Latin for sectus, secare, meaning "to divide or cut." Therefore, regardless of the various studies applied to defining sex as inscribed by discursive acts, i.e. merely a 'performatively enacted signification,' there is something more to sex than just a social construction or an aprioristic substance. Sex is irreducible to meaning or knowledge. This is why psychoanalysis cannot be formulated as an erotology nor a science of sex (scientia sexualis). In this matter, sex escapes the symbolic restraints of language; however, it is through its failure that it manifests itself through the symbolic, e.g. symptoms or dream life. So, what is sex? Sex and Nothing embarks upon a dialogue between colleagues and friends interested in bridging psychoanalysis and philosophy, linking sex and thought, where what emerges is a greater awareness of the irreducucibility of sex to the discourse of knowledge and meaning: in other words, sex and nothing.

Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788734645

Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the “linguistic turn” in modern philosophy, and anatomizes the “anti-philosophy” of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Addressing the crucial moment where Wittgenstein argues that much has to be passed over in silence—showing what cannot be said, after accepting the limits of language and meaning—Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a series of esoteric aphorisms. in the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project—and that a continuing dialogue with the exemplar of anti-philosophy is crucial for contemporary philosophy.

Marx and Freud in Latin America

Marx and Freud in Latin America
Author: Bruno Bosteels
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1844678474

This book assesses the untimely relevance of Marx and Freud for Latin America, thinkers alien to the region who became an inspiration to its beleaguered activists, intellectuals, writers and artists during times of political and cultural oppression. Bruno Bosteels presents ten case studies arguing that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theatre, film—more than any militant tract or theoretical essay, can give us a glimpse into Marxism and psychoanalysis, not so much as sciences of history or of the unconscious, respectively, but rather as two intricately related modes of understanding the formation of subjectivity.

Lacan Deleuze Badiou

Lacan Deleuze Badiou
Author: A. J Bartlett
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2015-01-30
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748682074

'Lacan Deleuze Badiou' guides us through the crucial, under-remarked interrelations between these three thinkers, identifying the conceptual passages, connections and disjunctions that underlie the often superficial statements of critique, indifference or