3,560 research outputs found
Introduction: Must We Burn Masud Khan?
No full textFree access to the published article is kindly provided by Edinburgh University Press online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/pah.2024.0506 .Following the publication of a first instalment of the 39 Work Books of M. Masud R. Khan in November 2022 and the recent donation to the Freud Museum London of the full original correspondence between Khan and Wladimir Granoff, and between Khan and Victor Smirnoff, this essay serves the dual purpose of ensuring that Khan’s memory is being kept alive and informing its readership of the newly available archival documents. It briefly retraces the history of Khan’s conflicts with the British Psychoanalytical Society up to the destruction, in July 2019, of the Khan archives that were in the possession of the International Psychoanalytical Association. In addition, the author recounts how he came into possession of the letters Khan exchanged with Granoff and Smirnoff, and why it was decided to establish a Khan archive at the Freud Museum London. The prospect of this new archive being supplemented with the letters from Khan to his second wife, Svetlana Beriosova, and a full copy of the Work Books is also discussed
The politics of gift-giving and the provocation of Lars Von Trier's Dogville
No full textIn what follows, I wish to use the circumstances and dynamics of the nocturnal scene of destruction at the Old Mill and the subsequent scene of carnage at the house of Chuck and Vera in Dogville as a springboard for developing some reflections on the ‘politics of gift-giving’, and the relationship between friendship and hostility in the exchange of social goods. The term ‘springboard’ is no doubt too vague, here, because I intend to approach the two scenes, and the film as a whole, as a radical provocation, thus distinguishing my approach from the traditional methodology of ‘application’, in which a work of art is used in order to exemplify a certain theoretical construction. As it happens, ‘provocation vs. illustration’ in itself constitutes one of the key ‘moral’ antagonisms of von Trier’s film and, as I shall argue, it is the dogged determination of Tom Edison Jr. (Paul
Bettany), the town’s amateur-philosopher, moral lecturer and self-crowned “miner of the human soul”, to illustrate the human problem and his failure to be provoked which brings unrest to the township of Dogville and which finally makes it go to the dogs
The Irredeemable Debt: On the English Translation of Lacan's First Two Public Seminars
No full text Drawing on archival sources and personal recollections, this essay reconstructs the troubled history of the first robust attempt at making the works of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan newly available to an anglophone readership, after his death in 1981. It details how the project was initiated by John Forrester as part of a large-scale initiative to generate translations of both Lacan's own texts and seminars, and various books written in the Lacanian tradition. If, almost seven years after it was conceived, Forrester's project only resulted in the publication of English translations of Lacan's first two public seminars, the essay demonstrates that this was not owing to disagreements over the quality of Forrester's work, but because of two consecutive sources of resistance. External resistance from publishers first led to the initial project being reduced to the translation of two seminars, whereas internal resistance from Lacan's son-in-law Jacques-Alain Miller to Forrester's vision of presenting the seminars with a full scholarly apparatus subsequently brought about delays in its execution. </jats:p
How to Grow a Nose: The Education of Desire in More's Utopia and Sade's Libertine Republic
No full textIn this essay, Thomas More’s enduringly enigmatic Utopia (1516) is read alongside D.A.F. de Sade’s “Frenchmen, Some More Effort if You Wish to Become Republicans” (1795), based on four distinct convergences between the two texts. In retracing and unpacking these synergies, it is demonstrated that reading More with Sade may generate a fresh perspective on what, in utopian studies, is designated as the ‘education of desire’, as it impacts upon the vexed relationship between happiness and hedonism. It is argued, through a combined reading of More and Sade, that the texts celebrate satire as the most advanced technique for destabilizing doctrinal knowledge but also, and more importantly, that they may function as lasting reminders of the fictional status of autonomous selfhood and the intrinsic impossibility of full satisfaction—happiness being no more than an unpredictable momentary occurrence that is predicated upon the ineluctable dissatisfaction of desire and the empty promises of a limitless hedonism. The hope of these texts, which should also be the hope of all educational discourses in the 21st century, is that they do not contribute in any way to the promotion of a new disciplinary practice, through which desire would be modelled, shaped and tamed, but rather to an emancipatory form of instruction, in which the ‘education of desire’ is geared towards the creation of an endless ‘desire for education’, supported by the faculty of critical analysis, whose distinguished flag features a really good nose, insofar as the latter epitomized the quintessential seat of satire during the Renaissance period
Nature
No full textReferences to nature abound in Sade’s works, both in the libertine books for which he gained notoriety and in his more conventional novels, stories, and plays. The way in which nature is conceived in these texts takes its bearings from the ideology of nature that underpinned the influential Enlightenment philosophies of his time, especially those formulated by so-called Radical Enlightenment thinkers such as La Mettrie, d’Holbach, Helvétius, and Diderot. Drawing on a combination of ideas derived from Spinoza, Lucretius, and Epicurus, these philosophers argued that nature represents a purely physical system of interactions between particles that are made up of matter and motion. This materialist doctrine coincided with a fervent defense of atheism. In the minds of the Radical Enlightenment philosophers, God constitutes not only a logical fallacy, but also an agency that both justifies human suffering as a form of redemption for human beings’ sinful earthly existence and induces more pain and misery by preventing human beings from living in accordance with their own state of nature. These materialist, rationalist, and atheist principles then informed a moral philosophy that is predicated upon the fundamental, natural equality of all human beings and the promotion of a utilitarian ethics in which citizens will only experience happiness if they agree to work together for a common good. Self-interest needs to be balanced against the interest of others, because this virtue of reciprocity is the only way for individual pleasure to be guaranteed. One can easily recognize, here, the Epicurean guide to the good life, which does not advocate limitless hedonism, but rather a strictly measured, calculated satisfaction of essential desires as the necessary precondition for mental tranquility (ataraxia)...
Between Affect and Signifier: A Comparison of Lacanian and 'Modern Psychoanalytic' Theories of Psychosis
No full textSade Reads d'Holbach: Atheism, Materialism, and Atopy in the Rise of the Avant-Garde
No full textFor all Sade’s insistence, in his “Last Will and Testament” of January 30, 1806, that his burial should be arranged in such a way that “the traces of [the] grave may disappear from the face of the earth as … the memory of [his existence] shall fade out of the minds of all men,” by the mid-twentieth century, he had acquired a status of almost mythical proportions among the artistic vanguard in France. From one of the most vilified aristocrats, who had been incarcerated under no fewer than four different political regimes and whose name had been employed to label an abhorrent sexual perversion, he had become the ultimate free spirit, an icon of obstinate revolt against all oppressive and restrictive systems of power. In his introduction to the first major anthology of Sade’s writings, published in 1909, the French proto-modernist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who famously invented the term “surrealism,” gladly invoked Sade as “the divine Marquis,” thereby borrowing the moniker he had been accorded by the French medical doctor and historian Augustin Cabanès. During the second half of the nineteenth century, Sade had already been the constant if silent companion to literary greats such as Flaubert, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Huysmans, Swinburne, and d’Annunzio. With Apollinaire’s blessing, Sade would be discussed more openly as the most radical creative writer, away from the medico-legal and forensic textbooks in which he had featured prominently as the inveterate chronicler of the human sexual aberrations...
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