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<div>'''Sigmund Freud''', born '''Sigismund Schlomo Freud''' (May 6 1856 &ndash; September 23 1939), was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and [[psychiatrist]] who co-founded the [[psychoanalysis|psychoanalytic school]] of [[psychology]]. Freud is best known for his theories of the [[unconscious mind]], especially involving the mechanism of [[Psychological repression|repression]]; his redefinition of [[sexual desire]] as mobile and directed towards a wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic techniques, especially his understanding of [[transference]] in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of [[dream]]s as sources of insight into unconscious desires.<br />
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He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential — popularizing such notions as the unconscious, [[defence mechanism|defense mechanism]]s, [[Freudian slips]] and [[dream symbolism]] — while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as [[literature]] ([[Kafka]]), [[film]], [[Marxism|Marxist]] and [[feminist]] theories, [[literary criticism]], [[philosophy]], and [[psychology]]. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. <br />
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==Biography==<br />
===Early life===<br />
Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in Příbor (''Freiberg'' in German), Moravia (then Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic), on 6 May 1856. His father Jacob was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother Amalia was 21. Owing to his intellect, which was obvious from an early stage of his childhood, his parents favored him over his siblings, and even though they were poor they offered everything to give him a proper education. As a result, Freud did extremely well during his first 8 years of school, but at the age of 17, he had to move to the University in Vienna because of the strong anti-Semitism in Austria at the time, at which time his grades plummeted.<br />
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===Medical school===<br />
In 1874, the concept of "[[psychodynamics]]" was seeded with the publication of ''Lectures on Physiology'' by German physiologist [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Ernst von Brücke]] who, in coordination with physicist [[Hermann von Helmholtz]], one of the formulators of the [[first law of thermodynamics]] ([[conservation of energy]]), supposed that all living organisms are energy-systems also governed by this principle. During this year, at the [[University of Vienna]], Brucke was also coincidentally the supervisor for first-year medical student Sigmund Freud who naturally adopted this new “dynamic” physiology. In his ''Lectures on Physiology'', Brücke set forth the radical view that the living organism is a [[dynamic system]] to which the laws of [[chemistry]] and [[physics]] apply.<ref name="Hall">{{cite book | last = Hall | first = Calvin, S.| title = A Primer in Freudian Psychology | publisher = Meridian Book | year = 1954 | id = ISBN 0452011833}}</ref> This was the starting point for Freud's dynamic psychology of the mind and its relation to the [[unconscious]].<ref name="Hall" /><ref>[http://www.humanthermodynamics.com/Freud.html Freud's Psycho Dynamic Theory and Thermodynamics] [1873-1923] - Institute of Human Thermodynamics</ref> The origins of Freud’s basic model, based on the fundmentals of chemistry and physics, according to [[John Bowlby]], stems from [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Brücke]], [[Meynert]], [[Josef Breuer|Breuer]], [[Helmholtz]], and [[Herbart]].<ref name="Bowlby">{{cite book | last = Bowlby | first = John | title = Attachment and Loss: Vol I, 2nd Ed. | publisher = Basic Books | pages = 13-23| year = 1999 | id = ISBN 0-465-00543-8}}</ref><br />
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===Later life===<br />
Freud married in 1886, after the opening of a private clinic, specializing in nerve and brain damage. After using [[hypnosis]] on his neurotic patients for a long period, he abandoned this form of treatment, in favor of a better treatment, where the patient talked through his or her problem.<br />
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Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychotherapist, told a colleague about his first visit with Sigmund Freud in the year 1907. Jung had much that he wanted to talk about with Freud, and he spoke with intense animation for three whole hours. Finally Freud interrupted him and, to Jung's astonishment, proceeded to group the contents of Jung's monologue into several precise categories that enabled them to spend their remaining hours together in a more profitable give-and-take. <ref>Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited and abridged by Lionell Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), p. 253.</ref><br />
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Freud held the opinion (based on personal experience and observation) that sexual activity was incompatible with the accomplishing of any great work. Since he felt that the great work of creating and establishing psychotherapy was his destiny, he told his wife that they could no longer engage in sexual relations. Indeed from about the age of forty until his death Freud was absolutely celibate “in order to sublimate the libido for creative purposes,” according to his biographer [[Ernest Jones]].<br />
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Nonetheless, there has been persistent gossip, which has always been staunchly denied by Freud loyalists, about the possibility that around this time a romantic liaison had blossomed between Freud, and his sister-in-law, who had moved in with the Freuds in 1896. This rumour of an illicit relationship has been most notably propelled forward by [[Carl Jung|C. G. Jung]], Freud's disciple and later his archrival, who had claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed the affair to him. (This claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung's part.) It has been suggested that the affair resulted in a pregnancy and subsequently an abortion for Miss Bernays.<br />
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A hotel log dated [[August 13]], [[1898]] seems to support the allegation of an affair.<ref>{{cite news| first=Ralph|last= Blumenthal| title=Hotel log hints at desire that Freud didn't repress| publisher=International Herald Tribune| date=24 December 2006| url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/24/europe/web.1224freud.php}}</ref><br />
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In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). During this time Freud was involved in the task of exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), and "he also recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm, and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67). Corey (2001) considers this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's life.<br />
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After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1901, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. Freud often chose to disregard the criticisms of those who were skeptical of his theories, however, and even gained a few direct opponents as a result,{{Fact|date=March 2007}} the most famous being [[Carl Jung]], who was originally in support of Freud's ideas. <br />
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In 1930 Freud received the [[Goethe Prize]] in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture. Three years later the [[Nazis]] took control of [[Germany]] and Freud's books featured prominently amongst those burned by the Nazis. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the [[Anschluss]]. This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the [[Gestapo]]. Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom". He and his family left Vienna in June 1938 and traveled to [[London]]. <br />
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A heavy cigar smoker, Freud endured more than 30 operations during his life due to [[mouth cancer]]. In September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend [[Max Schur]] to assist him in suicide. After reading [[Balzac]]'s ''[[La Peau de chagrin]]'' in a single sitting he said, "My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more." Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud's death on September 23, 1939.<ref>{{cite book| last=Gay| first= Peter| year=1988| title=Freud: A Life for Our Time| location=New York| publisher= W. W. Norton & Company |authorlink=Peter Gay|}}</ref> <br />
Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at [[Golders Green Crematorium]] during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author [[Stefan Zweig]]. His ashes were later placed in the crematorium's [[columbarium]]. They rest in an ancient Greek urn which Freud had received as a present from [[Marie Bonaparte]] and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After Martha Freud's death in [[1951]], her ashes were also placed in that urn. Golders Green Crematorium has since also become the final resting place for [[Anna Freud]] and her lifelong friend [[Dorothy Burlingham]], as well as for several other members of the Freud family.<br />
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==Innovations==<br />
Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways. He simultaneously developed a theory of how the human [[mind]] is organized and operates internally, and how human [[behavior]] both conditions and results from this particular theoretical understanding. This lead him to favor certain clinical techniques for attempting to help cure [[Mental illness|psychopathology]].<br />
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===Early work===<br />
[[Image:Tavistock and Freud statue.JPG|thumb|300px|right|Sigmund Freud memorial in [[Hampstead]], north London. Sigmund and [[Anna Freud|Anna]] Freud lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens, directly opposite the statue; the house is now a museum dedicated to his life and work. The building behind the statue is the [[Tavistock Clinic]], a major psychiatric institution.]]Due to [[Neurology]] and [[Psychiatry]] not being recognized as distinct medical fields at the time of Sigmund Freud's training, the medical degree he obtained after studying for six years at the [[University of Vienna]] board certified him in both Neurology and Psychiatry, although he is far more well-known for his work in the latter. As far as neurology went, Freud was an early researcher on the topic of [[neurophysiology]], specifically [[cerebral palsy]], which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed far before other researchers in his day began to notice and study it. He also suggested that [[William Little (English surgeon)|William Little]], the man who first identified [[cerebral palsy]], was wrong about lack of [[oxygen]] during the birth process being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom of the problem. It was not until the 1980s that Freud's speculations were confirmed by more modern research.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}<br />
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Freud was an early user and proponent of [[cocaine]] as a stimulant as well as [[analgesic]]. He wrote several articles on the [[antidepressant]] qualities of the drug and he was influenced by his friend and confidant [[Wilhelm Fliess]], who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the "nasal reflex neurosis." Fliess operated on Freud and a number of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, including [[Emma Eckstein]], whose surgery proved disastrous. <br />
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Freud felt that cocaine would work as a cure-all for many disorders and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca," explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend [[Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow]] to help him overcome a morphine [[addiction]] he had acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also recommended it to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on obtaining [[scientific priority]] for discovering cocaine's [[anesthesia|anesthetic]] properties (of which Freud was aware but on which he had not written extensively), after [[Karl Koller]], a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, presented a report to a medical society in 1884 outlining the ways in which cocaine could be used for delicate [[Ophthalmic|eye]] surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early ambition. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events, which later biographers have dubbed "The Cocaine Incident." <br />
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Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or [[psychoanalysis]], was to bring to [[consciousness]] repressed thoughts and feelings. According to some of his successors, including his daughter Anna Freud, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to develop a stronger [[Ego, super-ego, and id|ego]]; according to others, notably [[Jacques Lacan]], the goal of therapy is to lead the [[analysand]] to a full acknowledgment of his or her inability to satisfy the most basic desires. <br />
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Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in [[free association]] and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, [[transference]], the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents.<br />
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The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to [[Josef Breuer|Joseph Breuer]]. Freud actually credits Breuer with the discovery of the psychoanalytical method. One case started this phenomenon that would shape the field of psychology for decades to come, the case of [[Anna O.]] In 1880 a young girl came to Breuer with symptoms of what was then called [[female hysteria]]. Anna O. was a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman. She presented with symptoms such as paralysis of the limbs, [[Dissociative identity disorder|split personality]] and amnesia; today these symptoms are known as [[conversion disorder]]. After many doctors had given up and accused Anna O. of faking her symptoms, Breuer decided to treat her sympathetically, which he did with all of his patients. He started to hear her mumble words during what he called states of absence. Eventually Breuer started to recognize some of the words and wrote them down. He then hypnotized her and repeated the words to her; Breuer found out that the words were associated with her father's illness and death. <br />
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In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique". The traditional story, based on Freud's later accounts of this period, is that as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but after having heard a patient tell the story about Freud's personal friend being the victimizer, Freud concluded that his patients were fantasizing the abuse scenes. <br />
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In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from ''unconscious'' memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients (one third of whom were men). However a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates that these patients did not report early childhood sexual abuse as he later claimed: rather, he arrived at his findings by analytically inferring the supposed incidents, using a procedure that was heavily dependent on the symbolic interpretation of somatic symptoms.<br />
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===The unconscious===<br />
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Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his argument for the existence of an [[unconscious mind]]. During the 19th century, the dominant trend in [[western world|Western]] thought was [[positivism]], which subscribed to the belief that people could ascertain real knowledge concerning themselves and their environment and judiciously exercise control over both. Freud, however, suggested that such declarations of free will are in fact delusions; that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts.<br />
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The concept of the unconscious as proposed by Freud was considered by some to be groundbreaking in that he proposed that awareness existed in layers and that some thoughts occurred "below the surface." Nevertheless, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others, pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, [[William James]], in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".<ref>Meyer (2005, 217).</ref> [[Boris Sidis]], a Jewish Russian who escaped to the USA in 1887, and studied under [[William James]], wrote ''The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society'' in 1898, followed by ten or more works over the next twenty five years on similar topics to the works of Freud.<br />
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Moreover, the historian of psychology Mark Altschule wrote: "It is difficult - or perhaps impossible - to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance."<ref>{{cite book| last=Altschule| first= M| year=1977| title=Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior| location=New York| publisher= Wiley| pages= 199}}, cited in [http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=57 Allen Esterson, Freud returns?]</ref> Freud's advance was not, then, to uncover the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it.<br />
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[[Dream]]s, which he called the "royal road to the unconscious," provided the best access to our unconscious life and the best illustration of its "logic," which was different from the logic of conscious thought. Freud developed his first [[topology]] of the psyche in ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'' (1899) in which he proposed the argument that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The [[preconscious]] was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought&mdash;that which we could access with a little effort. Thus for Freud, the ideals of [[the Enlightenment]], positivism and [[rationalism]], could be achieved through understanding, transforming, and mastering the unconscious, rather than through denying or repressing it.<br />
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Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is "[[Psychological repression|repression]]." According to Freud, people often experience thoughts and feelings that are so painful that they cannot bear them. Such thoughts and feelings&mdash;and associated memories&mdash;could not, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but could be banished from consciousness. Thus they come to constitute the unconscious. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that individual patients repress different things. Moreover, Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a non-conscious act (in other words, it did not occur through people willing away certain thoughts or feelings). Freud supposed that what people repressed was in part determined by their unconscious. In other words, the unconscious was for Freud both a cause and effect of repression.<br />
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Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the [[descriptive unconscious]], the [[dynamic unconscious]], and the [[system unconscious]]. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific [[social construct|construct]], referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement. <br />
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Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the [[Ego, super-ego, and id]] (discussed below). Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.<br />
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===Psychosexual development===<br />
{{main|Psychosexual development}}<br />
Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient [[mythology]] and contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the [[Oedipus complex]] after the famous [[Greek tragedy]] ''[[Oedipus the King|Oedipus Rex]]'' by [[Sophocles]]. “I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood,” Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification (cf. ''[[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]''). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire [[incest]] and must repress that desire. The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to [[cultural anthropology|anthropological]] studies of [[totemism]] and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal [[Oedipal conflict]].<br />
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Freud originally posited childhood [[sexual abuse]] as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory, noting that he had found many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events. During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual etiology of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had been sexually abused by their fathers, and was quite explicit about discussing several patients whom he knew to have been abused.<ref>{{cite book |title=Freud: A Life for Our Time| pages=p.95|}}</ref><br />
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Freud also believed that the [[libido]] developed in individuals by changing its object, a process designed by the concept of ''[[sublimation (psychology)|sublimation]]''. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development&mdash;first in the [[oral stage]] (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the [[anal stage]] (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the [[phallic stage]]. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the [[Oedipus Complex]]) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The lesser known [[Electra complex]] refers to such a fixation on the father.) The repressive or dormant [[The_Latency_Phase_%286-12_years_of_age%29|latency stage]] of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature [[genital stage]] of psychosexual development. <br />
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Freud's way of interpretation has been called phallocentric by many contemporary thinkers. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious always desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of castration - losing their phallus or masculinity to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus - an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs. For Freud, desire is always defined in the negative term of lack - you always desire what you don't have or what you are not, and it is very unlikely that you will fulfill this desire. Thus his psychoanalysis treatment is meant to teach the patient to cope with his or her unsatisfiable desires.<br />
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===Ego, super-ego, and id===<br />
{{main|Ego, super-ego, and id}}<br />
In his later work, Freud proposed that the psyche could be divided into three parts: [[Ego, super-ego, and id]]. <br />
Freud discussed this structural model of the mind in the 1920 essay ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'', and fully elaborated it in ''[[The Ego and The Id]]'' (1923), where he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (conscious, unconscious, preconscious).<br />
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Freud acknowledges that his use of the term Id (or the It) derives from the writings of [[Georg Grodeck]]. It is interesting to note that the term Id appears in the earliest writing of [[Boris Sidis]], attributed to [[William James]], as early as 1898.<br />
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===Defense mechanisms===<br />
According to Kirrilee Arb, the [[defense mechanisms]] are the methods by which the ego can deal with conflicts between the super-ego and the id. The use of defense mechanisms may attenuate the conflict between the id and super-ego, but their overuse or reuse rather than confrontation can lead to either anxiety or [[guilt]] which may result in psychological disorders such as depression. His daughter [[Anna Freud]] had done the most significant work on this field, yet she credited Sigmund with defense mechanisms as he began the work. The defense mechanisms include [[denial]], [[reaction formation]], [[Displacement (psychology)|displacement]], [[psychological repression|repression]]/[[suppression]] (the proper term), [[psychological projection|projection]], [[intellectualization]], [[rationalization (psychology)|rationalization]], compensation, [[sublimation (psychology)|sublimation]] and [[regressive emotionality]].<br />
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*''Denial'' occurs when someone fends off awareness of an unpleasant truth or of a reality that is a threat to the ego. For example, a student may have received a bad grade on a report card but tells himself that grades don't matter. (Some early writers argued for a striking parallel between Freudian denial and [[Nietzsche]]'s ideas of ''[[ressentiment]]'' and the ''revaluation of values'' that he attributed to "herd" or "slave" morality.)<br />
*''Reaction formation'' takes place when a person takes the opposite approach consciously compared to what that person wants unconsciously. For example, someone may engage in violence against another race because, that person claims, the members of the race are inferior, when unconsciously it is that very person who feels inferior.<br />
*''Displacement'' takes place when someone redirects emotion from a "dangerous" object to a "safe" one, such as punching a pillow when one is angry at a friend.<br />
*''[[Psychological repression|Repression]]'' occurs when an experience is so painful (such as war trauma) that it is unconsciously forced from consciousness, while ''suppression'' is a conscious effort to do the same.<br />
*''[[Psychological projection]]'' occurs when a person "projects" his or her own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings — basically parts of oneself — onto someone or something else. Since the person is experiencing particular desires, feelings, thoughts, or anxieties, s/he is more prone to [[attribution theory|attribute]] those same characteristics to the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others.<br />
*''Intellectualization'' involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event, by focusing on rational and factual components of the situation. <br />
*''Rationalization'' involves constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. For example, Jim may drink red wine because he is an alcoholic, but he tells himself he drinks it because it has some health benefits, in order to avoid facing his alcoholism.<br />
*''Compensation'' occurs when someone takes up one behaviour because one cannot accomplish another behaviour. For example, the second born child may clown around to get attention since the older child is already an accomplished scholar.<br />
*''Sublimation'' is the channeling of impulses to socially accepted behaviours. For instance, an aggressive or homicidal person may join the military as a cover for their violent behavior.<br />
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===The life and death instincts===<!-- This section is linked from [[Erich Fromm]] --><br />
Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive ([[Eros (Freud)|Eros]]) (incorporating the sex drive) and the death drive ([[Thanatos]]). Freud's description of Eros and Libido included all creative, life-producing drives. The [[death drive]] (or death instinct) represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm, or, ultimately, of non-existence. The presence of the Death Drive was only recognized in his later years, and the contrast between the two represents a revolution in his manner of thinking. The death instinct is also referred to as the [[Nirvana]] Principle.<br />
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It should be added that these ideas owe a great deal to both Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in ''The World as Will and Representation'', describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive. The life drive clearly owes much to Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in ''The Birth of Tragedy''. Freud was an avid reader of both philosophers and acknowledged their influence.<br />
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===Social psychology===<br />
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[[Image:PICT4139.JPG|thumb|250px|Freud boarding a Lufthansa flight in the 1930s. (Memorial to the German Resistance, Berlin)]]<br />
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Freud gave explanations of the genesis of religion in his writings, included in a reflection on [[crowd psychology]]. In ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (1913), he proposed that humans originally banded together in “primal hordes”, consisting of a male, a number of females and the offspring of this [[polygamous]] arrangement. According to Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, a male child early in life has sexual desires for his mother – the [[Oedipus Complex]] – which he held to be [[Universality (philosophy)|universal]]. [[Ethnology|Ethnologists]] would later criticize this point, leading to ethno-psychoanalytic studies. According to Freud, the father is protective, so his sons love him, but they are also jealous of their father for his relationship with their mothers. Finding that individually they cannot defeat the father-leader, they band together, kill and eat him in a ritual meal, thereby ingesting the substance of the father’s hated power – but their subsequent guilt leads the sons to elevate their father's memory and to worship him. The [[super-ego]] then takes the place of the father as the source of internalized authority. A ban was then put upon [[incest]] and upon [[marriage]] within the clan, and symbolic animal [[sacrifice]] was substituted for the ritual killing of a human being.<br />
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In ''[[Moses and Monotheism]]'' (1939) Freud reconstructed biblical history in accord with his general theory, but many biblical scholars and historians would not accept his account since it defied commonly accepted views on the [[Jewish history|history of Judaism]] and of dynastic Egypt. However, this book remains interesting as an interpretation of [[leadership]] based on [[charisma]] and [[mass psychology]], using the [[Prophet]]ic figure of Moses. His ideas about [[religion]] were also developed in ''[[The Future of an Illusion]]'' (1927). When Freud spoke of religion as an [[illusion]], he maintained that it is a [[fantastic]] structure from which a man must be set free if he is to grow to [[maturity]]; and in his treatment of the unconscious he moved toward [[atheism]]. In this sense, Freud approached the [[Marxism|Marxist theory]] of [[Marx's theory of alienation|alienation]]. Freud isolated two main principles: [[Death instinct|Thanatos]] is the drive towards the dissolution of all life, whereas [[Eros (love)|Eros]] is to strive towards stopping that drive. When one goal is reached, the other becomes out-of-reach, and vice versa. <br />
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In ''"[[Group Psychology]] and Ego Analysis"'' (''Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analysis'', 1920), Freud explored crowd psychology, continuing [[Gustave Le Bon]]'s early work. When the individual joins a crowd, he ceases repressing his instincts, and thus relapses into [[primitive culture]], according to Freud's analysis. However, crowds must be distinguished into natural and organized crowds, following [[William McDougall (psychologist)|William McDougall]]'s distinction. Thus, if intellectual skills (the capacity to [[doubt]] and to distance oneself) are systematically reduced when the individual joins a mass, he may eventually be "morally enlightened". Prefiguring ''Moses and Monotheism'' and ''The Future of an Illusion'', he states that the love relationship between the leader and the masses, in the Church or in the Army, are only an "idealist transformation of the conditions existing in the primitive horde". Freud then compares the leader's relationship with the crowd to a relation of [[hypnosis]], a force to which he relates [[Mana]]. Pessimistic about humanity's chances of [[liberty]], Freud writes that "the leader of the crowd always incarnates the dreaded primitive father, the crowd always wants to be dominated by an unlimited power, it is grasping at the highest degree for [[authority]] or, to use [[Gustave Le Bon|Le Bon]]'s expression, it is hungry for subservience".<br />
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According to Freud, [[self-identification]] to a common figure, the leader, explained the phenomenon of masses' obedience. Each individual connected themselves vertically to the same ideal figure (or [[idea]]), each one thus has the same self-ideal, and hence identify together (horizontal relation). Freud also quoted [[Wilfred Trotter]]'s ''The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War'' (1914). Along with ''Moses and Monotheism'', ''Massenpsychologie...'' would be one of the articles most quoted by Wilhelm Reich and the [[Frankfurt School]] in its [[Freudo-Marxism|Freudo-Marxist]] synthesis.<br />
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==Freud's legacy==<br />
[[image:1freud-enlargement.JPG|thumb|left|200px|Freud on the Austrian 50-Schilling Note]]<br />
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=== Psychotherapy ===<br />
{{main|Psychotherapy}}<br />
Freud's theories and research methods were controversial during his life and still are so today, but few dispute his huge impact on [[psychologists]] and the academically inclined.<br />
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Most importantly, Freud popularized the "talking-cure"&mdash;an idea that a person could solve problems simply by talking over them, something that was almost unheard of in the 19th century. Even though many psychotherapists today tend to reject the specifics of Freud's theories, this basic mode of treatment comes largely from his work.<br />
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Most of Freud's specific theories&mdash;like his stages of psychosexual development&mdash;and especially his methodology, have fallen out of favor in modern [[experimental psychology]].<br />
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Some psychotherapists, however, still follow an approximately Freudian system of treatment. Many more have modified his approach, or joined one of the schools that branched from his original theories (see [[Neo-Freudian]]). Still others reject his theories entirely, although their practice may still reflect his influence.<br />
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[[Psychoanalysis]] today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life.<br />
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=== Philosophy ===<br />
While he saw himself as a scientist, yet failed to employ any aspect of the scientific method, he greatly admired [[Theodor Lipps]], a philosopher and main supporter of the ideas of the subconscious and empathy.<ref>{{cite journal| last=Pigman| first= G.W.| url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7628894&dopt=Abstract | title=Freud and the history of empathy| journal=The International journal of psycho-analysis| year= 1995| month=April| volume=76 (Pt 2)| pages=237-56}}</ref> Freud's theories have had a tremendous impact on the [[humanities]]--especially on the [[Frankfurt school]] and [[critical theory]]. Freud's model of the mind is often criticized as an unsubstantiated challenge to the [[Age of Enlightenment|enlightenment]] model of rational [[Agency (philosophy)|agency]], which was a key element of much [[modern philosophy]].<br />
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* '''Rationality'''. While many enlightenment thinkers viewed rationality as both an unproblematic ideal and a defining feature of man, Freud's model of the mind drastically reduced the scope and power of reason. In Freud's view, reasoning occurs in the conscious mind--the ego--but this is only a small part of the whole. The mind also contains the hidden, irrational elements of id and superego, which lie outside of conscious control, drive behavior, and motivate conscious activities. As a result, these structures call into question humans' ability to act purely on the basis of reason, since lurking motives are also always at play. Moreover, this model of the mind makes rationality itself suspect, since it may be motivated by hidden urges or societal forces (e.g. defense mechanisms, where reasoning becomes "rationalizing").<br />
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* '''Transparency of Self'''. Another common assumption in pre-Freudian philosophy was that people have immediate and unproblematic access to themselves. Emblematic of this position is [[René Descartes]]' famous [[dictum]], "''Cogito ergo sum''" ("I think, therefore I am"). For Freud, however, many central aspects of a person remain radically inaccessible to the conscious mind (without the aid of psychotherapy), which undermines the once unquestionable status of first-person knowledge.<br />
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===Critical reactions===<br />
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Although Freud's theories were quite influential, they came under widespread criticism during his lifetime and afterward. A paper by [[Lydiard H. Horton]], read in 1915 at a joint meeting of the [[American Psychological Association]] and the [[New York Academy of Sciences]], called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and noted that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psycho analytically". [[A. C. Grayling]], writing in ''The Guardian'' in 2002, said "Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade....But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him." [[Peter D. Kramer]], a [[psychiatrist]] and faculty member of [[Brown Medical School]], said "I'm afraid [Freud] doesn't hold up very well at all. It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality." A 2006 article in [[Newsweek magazine]] called him "history's most debunked doctor."<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandthejudaeochristiantradition.html | title = Freud in Our Midst | publisher = Newsweek | date = 27 March 2006 | accessdate = 2007-03-27}}</ref><br />
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According to Richard Webster, author of ''Why Freud Was Wrong'' (1995):<br />
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{{cquote|Freud made no substantial intellectual discoveries. He was the creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilisation. In creating his particular pseudo-science, Freud developed an autocratic, anti-empirical intellectual style which has contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ills of our own era. His original theoretical system, his habits of thought and his entire attitude to scientific research are so far removed from any responsible method of inquiry that no intellectual approach basing itself upon these is likely to endure.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandthejudaeochristiantradition.html | title = Freud and the Judaeo-Christian tradition | publisher = The Times Literary Supplement | date = 23 May 1997 | accessdate = 2007-03-19}}</ref>}}<br />
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Other critics, like Dr. [[Frederick C. Crews]], Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of ''The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute'' (1995), are even more blunt: <br />
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{{cquote|He was a charlatan. In 1896 he published three papers on the ideology of hysteria claiming that he had cured X number of patients. First it was thirteen and then it was eighteen. And he had cured them all by presenting them, or rather by obliging them to remember, that they had been sexually abused as children. In 1897 he lost faith in this theory, but he'd told his colleagues that this was the way to cure hysteria. So he had a scientific obligation to tell people about his change of mind. But he didn't. He didn't even hint at it until 1905, and even then he wasn't clear. Meanwhile, where were the thirteen patients? Where were the eighteen patients? You read the Freud - Fleiss letters and you find that Freud's patients were leaving at the time. By 1897 he didn't have any patients worth mentioning, and he hadn't cured any of them, and he knew it perfectly well. Well, if a scientist did that today, of course he would be stripped of his job. He would be stripped of his research funds. He would be disgraced for life. But Freud was so brilliant at controlling his own legend that people can hear charges like this, and even admit that they're true, and yet not have their faith in the system of thought affected in any way.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Crews/crews-con3.html | title = Frederick Crews Interview | publisher = Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley| year = 1999 | first = Harry | last = Kreisler | accessdate = 2007-03-19}}</ref>}}<br />
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Another frequently criticized aspect of Freud's theories is his model of psychosexual development. Some have attacked Freud's claim that infants are sexual beings, and, implicitly, Freud's expanded notion of sexuality. Others have accepted Freud's expanded notion of sexuality, but have argued that this pattern of development is not universal, nor necessary for the development of a healthy adult. Instead, they have emphasized the social and environmental sources of patterns of development. Moreover, they call attention to [[social dynamics]] Freud de-emphasized or ignored, such as class relations. This branch of Freudian critique owes a great deal to the work of [[Herbert Marcuse]]. <br />
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Freud has also come under fire from many [[feminist]] critics. Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "[[Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness]]"). Some feminists, however, have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in [[Western culture]] back decades, and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority. Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a penis) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of [[misogyny]]. Terms such as "[[penis envy]]" and "[[castration anxiety]]" contributed to discouraging women from entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on [[Ida Bauer]] such as "''This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen''" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance'<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28">S.E. 7. pp28</ref> implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "''I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable''"<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28" /><br />
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On the other hand, [[feminist theory|feminist theorists]] such as [[Juliet Mitchell]], [[Nancy Chodorow]], [[Jessica Benjamin]], [[Jane Gallop]], and [[Jane Flax]] have argued that psychoanalytic theory is essentially related to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism. Freud's views are still being questioned by people concerned about women's equality. Another feminist who finds potential use of Freud's theories in the feminist movement is [[Shulamith Firestone]]. In "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism", she discusses how Freudianism is essentially completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud wrote "penis", the word should be replaced with "power". <br />
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Dr. Jurgen von Scheidt speculated that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his cocaine use.<ref>{{cite journal | last = Scheidt | first = Jürgen vom | year = 1973 | title = Sigmund Freud and cocaine | journal = Psyche | pages = pp. 385&ndash;430 }}</ref> Cocaine enhances dopaminergic neurotransmission increasing sexual interest and obsessive thinking. Chronic [[cocaine]] use can produce unusual thinking patterns due to the depletion of [[dopamine]] levels in the prefrontal [[cortex]].<br />
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Finally, Freud's theories are often criticized for not being real science.<ref>Ludwig, 1973, pg. 93</ref> This objection was raised most famously by [[Karl Popper]], who claimed that all proper [[scientific theories]] must be potentially [[falsifiable]]. Popper argued that no experiment or observation could ever falsify Freud's theories of psychology (e.g. someone who denies having an Oedipal complex is interpreted as repressing it), and thus they could not be considered scientific.<ref>Karl Popper, “Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report,” in ''British Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium'', ed. C. A. Mace (1957), 155-91; reprinted in Karl Popper, ''Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge'' (1963; 2d ed., 1965), 33-65.</ref> Some proponents of science conclude that this standard invalidates Freudian theory as a means of interpreting and explaining human behavior.<br />
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However, despite the aforementioned criticisms, scientific research has provided some support for Freudian theories. Indeed, recent research on the neuropsychology of dreaming indicates that Freud's dream theory (long thought to be discredited) is consistent with what is currently known about the dreaming brain. These findings have lead to the development of a new discipline, neuropsychoanalysis, which seeks to discover the neurological foundation of psychoanalytic theories.<br />
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Freudian theory has given way to dozens of other theories during the 20th century. As a "for instance," notable Christian theorists such as Dr. James Dobson, Dr. Gary Smalley and Dr. Bill McDonald, who practice a more modern cognitive-behavioral approach, have experienced extremely good results over the course of several decades.<br />
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==Patients==<br />
This is a partial list of patients whose case studies were published by Freud, with pseudonyms substituted for their names:<br />
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[[Image:Freud_Sofa.JPG|thumb|240px|Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions]]<br />
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* [[Anna O.]] = Bertha Pappenheim (1859&ndash;1936)<br />
* Cäcilie M. = Anna von Lieben<br />
* Dora = [[Ida Bauer]] (1882&ndash;1945)<br />
* Frau Emmy von N. = Fanny Moser<br />
* Fräulein Elizabeth von R.<br />
* Fräulein Katharina = Aurelia Kronich<br />
* Fräulein Lucy R.<br />
* [[Oedipus complex#Little Hans: a case study by Freud|Little Hans]] = [[Herbert Graf]] (1903&ndash;1973)<br />
* [[Rat Man]] = Ernst Lanzer (1878&ndash;1914)<br />
* [[Sergei Pankejeff|Wolf Man]] = Sergei Pankejeff (1887&ndash;1979)<br />
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Other patients:<br />
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* [[H.D.]] (1886&ndash;1961)<br />
* [[Emma Eckstein]] (1865&ndash;1924)<br />
* [[Gustav Mahler]] (1860&ndash;1911)<br />
* [[Princess Marie Bonaparte]]<br />
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People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published but who were not patients:<br />
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* [[Daniel Paul Schreber]] (1842&ndash;1911)<br />
* [[Woodrow Wilson]] (1856&ndash;1924) (co-authored with and primarily written by [[William Bullitt]])<br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
In a passage Žižek does not seem to cite, Freud links philosophy and the joke:<blockquote>“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, said Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He therefore added what was missing: “But there is much, too, in philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth”. (''[[Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious]]'', ''SE'' VIII: 72)</blockquote>Philosophy – says the joke – misses its target, always falling short or carrying on too far. The one thing it does not do in its relations to heaven and earth is coincide with them. Freud also uses that phrase, without irony, as a piece of wisdom, in at least three other places. Two of them speak to his fascination with the possibility of telepathy: the 1921 paper on “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (''SE'' XVIII: 178), and the lecture on “Dreams and Occultism” from the 1933 ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'' (SE XXII: 31). He concludes his introductory remarks to [[Wolf Man|the Wolf Man case]] history with the admission that even though the case is a good fit for current psychoanalytic knowledge (as indeed he needs it to be, for this is the case he wants to be the watershed for the various heresies that had been arising within the psychoanalytic camp), many of the details of it are “so extraordinary and incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them”. After that, “there was nothing left for me but to remember the wise saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (''SE'' XVII: 34). In all three of those later invocations, it is not used as a way of claiming a superior knowledge for psychoanalysis, but of saying that psychoanalysis does not know either. Psychoanalysis meets philosophy on this excess, this point that is both too much to fit into the knowledge either provides, and the too-little explanation either can off er. Psychoanalysis does not so much abandon philosophy as take in philosophy as its symptom.<br />
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Freud will usually say that he has no use for philosophy, which is in no “position to tell you anything serviceable of the relation between body and mind or to provide you with a key to an understanding of possible disturbances of the mental function” (''[[Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis]]'', ''SE'' XV: 20). What he is interested in is the particular. That is at the heart of his rejection of the popular “dream books” (''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'', ''SE'' IV: 97–9): instead of decoding the dream according to universal equivalences, the analyst needs to look for the “residues of the day”, those traces of the specific and complex contingencies of a life that make psychoanalysis into something like a science of biography. ''[[The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' some five years later (''SE'' VII: 123–245) will extend this focus on contingency to the drives themselves, whose aims and objects are similarly contingent and incalculable in advance. Drive, as Žižek will insist repeatedly (e.g. ''LA'': 32, 37; ''TS'': 293; ''PV'': 110; ''LN'': 495–6), is even the name for this perpetual discord. “It is here”, Žižek suggests, “that we should perhaps look for the basic premise of the Freudian theory of culture” (''LA'': 37).<br />
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And it is here, again, that we meet philosophy on this point of excess. The remnants of the day and the discord of drive are for Žižek versions of the Hegelian refrain, “The Spirit is a bone”, that runs through his work (e.g. ''SO'': 207–12; ''TN'': 34–5, 51, 62, 85; ''TS'': 88–9, 92–3; ''OB'': 143; ''PV'': 5, 33, 77, 84; ''ET'': 26). Following this logic of the general in the particular and the genus in the species, we could say that (1) the subject is the contingent; (2) but this is nonsense, there is an absolute contradiction between the two terms; and (3) that very contradiction is precisely the subject (see, for example, ''ET'': 534).We could say something similar of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy: it is not that they are just versions of each other, at heart saying the same thing, but that in the deep and insistent contradictions between them each finds that extimacy of what is in it more than it. Freud is a thinker of the Real, and in that an anti-philosopher in the same sense as Lacan: “Not ‘I am not a philosopher’, but ‘I am a not-philosopher’, that is, I stand for the excessive core of philosophy itself, for what is in philosophy more than philosophy” (''PV'': 389).<br />
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For Žižek, as for Badiou, “The basic motif of anti-philosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for [[Karl Marx|Marx]], Existence for [[Søren Kierkegaard|Kierkegaard]], Will for [[Schopenhauer]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], etc.), irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations” (''LN'': 841). Žižek finds in Freud that concern with the figure of rupture and event that runs through [[Walter Benjamin|Benjamin]] to [[Badiou]]. The Freudian subject is one whose time is out of joint with itself, and that exists only in this inconsistency (''LN'': 380), shot through with those chips of what Benjamin calls Messianic time (Benjamin 1973: 254– 5). We see this in the much-debated “''Wo es war, soll ich werden''” of the ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', and which Žižek along with Lacan translates as “Where it was, I shall come into being” (Freud, ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 80; Žižek uses this translation in the editorial description of books in Verso’s ''Wo Es War'' series, which he edits): one clause is in the past tense and the other in the future, as if that “it” and “I” were out of phase with each other. In the same lectures, Freud famously suggests that “One gets an impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically” (''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 134). But Freud’s is an incomplete anti-philosophy, for he cannot think the radical exteriority of trauma (ET: 295) and thus its purely political dimension. Žižek finds that dimension in Lacan’s claim to replace Freudian energetics with political economy (''PV'': 50), and in his insistence on the matheme as Real.<br />
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One of Žižek’s most frequent sets of references to this inconsistency and excess of the subject and the symbolic comes directly or indirectly from Freud’s great cultural myth of the primordial father in the 1913 ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (''SE'' XIII: 1–161). Žižek spends far more time here than with that other great Freudian myth, [[Oedipus]], which he describes as the obverse of the [[primordial father]]: if Oedipus is about how one deals with the agent of the [[Law’s prohibition]], the killing of the primordial father is what gives rise to that Law (''TS'': 315). As the Hegelian logic of “the Spirit is a bone” suggests, though, it does this not by providing an impossible narrative of the transition between nature and culture, but by suggesting the way in which what is unrepresentable in such a narrative is the very (and impossible) conditions of possibility for both terms, and of the clarity of the Law that gives sha''p''e to both of them (''OB'': 74). It is not that the symbolic and its Law are inhabited by an untellable and unnarratable mystery, but that the trauma of the Real of the constitutive act inhabits the symbolic as the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]] (LA: 23).<br />
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In the myth of the primordial father, we have the beginnings of Lacan’s various and ongoing formalizations of this impasse. The four discourses of Seminar XVII (''[[The Other Side of Psychoanalysis]]''), which he insists are cultural structures, provide the matrix of the possibilities of address. Their permutations circle the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]], inflecting the struggle of the sons with the father into the daughter’s struggle: the Master names the Event, but it is the hysteric who challenges the master (''TS'': 164). In the mathemes of sexuation, we have the primordial father as the exception to the Law founded by that very exceptionality, and the excessive and non-phallic ''[[jouissance]]'' it generates. The myth lends itself also in Žižek to a fertile theorization of politics, one that seeks to avoid the disavowals of ''[[Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego]]'' (''SE'' XVIII: 65–143), in which the political dimension is reduced to the figure of the “crowd” (TS: 191–2). Freud, Žižek argues, misses the sheer fanaticism that results from the undoing of the social bond (''LN'': 452), and the way in which the decline in Oedipal symbolic authority that characterizes late-capitalist liberal democracies is the obverse of the return of the primordial father as the agent of an obscene enjoyment (e.g. ME: 206; TS: 315; OB: 101; PD: 130), from the “totalitarian” leader to Hannibal Lecter. From his first formulation of the [[superego]], Freud is aware of its inherent and necessary contradiction, and the double bind in which it demands both that “You ''ought to be'' like this” and that “You ''may not be'' like this” (''[[The Ego and the Id]]'', ''SE'' XIX: 34). Žižek sharpens this into the single contradiction, “Enjoy!”; this superego imperative of late capitalist liberal democracy thus provides a radical re-interpretation of [[Louis Althusser|Althusser’s]] well-known theory of ideology as interpellation (e.g. ''TK'':108–9; ''TN'' 73–7; ''ME'': 59–62; ''TS'': 257–60).<br />
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==Notes==<br />
{{reflist}}<br />
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*Corey, Gerald (2000). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 6th ed. ISBN: 0534348238<br />
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==Bibliography==<br />
<div class="references-small" style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;"><br />
===Major works by Freud===<br />
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* ''[[Studies on Hysteria]]'' (with [[Josef Breuer]]) (''Studien über Hysterie'', 1895)<br />
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* ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'' (''Die Traumdeutung'', 1899 [1900])<br />
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* ''[[The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]'' (''Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens'', 1901)<br />
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* ''[[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' (''Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie'', 1905)<br />
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* ''[[Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious]]'' (''Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten'', 1905)<br />
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* ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (''Totem und Tabu'', 1913)<br />
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* ''[[On Narcissism]]'' (''Zur Einführung des Narzißmus'', 1914)<br />
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* ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'' (''Jenseits des Lustprinzips'', 1920)<br />
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* ''[[The Ego and the Id]]'' (''Das Ich und das Es'', 1923)<br />
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* ''[[The Future of an Illusion]]'' (''Die Zukunft einer Illusion'', 1927)<br />
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* ''[[Civilization and Its Discontents]]'' (''Das Unbehagen in der Kultur'', 1930)<br />
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* ''[[Moses and Monotheism]]'' (''Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion'', 1939)<br />
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* ''[[An Outline of Psycho-Analysis]]'' (''Abriß der Psychoanalyse'', 1940)<br />
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===Books about Freud and psychoanalysis===<br />
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* [[Ernest Jones]] : "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.", Publisher: Basic Books, 1981, ISBN 0-465-04015-2<br />
* "The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939, R. Andrew Paskauskas (Editor), Riccardo Steiner (Introduction), Publisher: Belknap Press; Reprint edition 1995, ISBN 0-674-15424-X <br />
* "The Language of Psycho-Analysis" , [[Jean Laplanche]] et J.B. Pontalis, Editeur: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, ISBN 0-393-01105-4<br />
* "Sigmund Freud and [[Lou Andreas-Salome]]" : Letters" Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 1985), ISBN 0-393-30261-X<br />
* [[Lou Andreas-Salome]] : "The Freud Journal" , Publisher: Texas Bookman, 1996, ISBN 0-7043-0022-2<br />
* [[Sabina Spielrein]] : "Destruction as cause of becoming", 1993, {{OCLC|44450080}}<br />
* [[Marthe Robert]] : "The Psychoanalytic Revolution", Publisher: Avon Books; Discus ed edition, 1968, {{OCLC|2401215}} <br />
* [[Bruno Bettelheim]] : "Freud and Man's Soul: An Important Re-Interpretation of Freudian Theory" Publisher: Vintage; Vintage edition, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71036-3<br />
* [[André Green]]: "The Work of the Negative" by Andre Green, Andrew Weller (Translator), Publisher: Free Association Books, 1999, ISBN 1-85343-470-1<br />
* André Green: "On Private Madness", Publisher: International Universities Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8236-3853-7<br />
* André Green: "The Chains of Eros", Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 1-85575-960-8<br />
* André Green: "Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm For Clinical Thinking" Publisher: Free Association Books, 2005, ISBN 1-85343-773-5<br />
* John Farrell. ''Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion'' (NYU Press, 1996). A vigorous account of the relations between Freud's logic, rhetoric, and personality, as well as his relations with literary sources like Cervantes, Goethe, and Swift.<br />
* Rieff, Philip. ''Freud: The Mind of the Moralist'', 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). <br />
* Roazen, Paul. ''Freud and His Followers'' (Random House, 1975). A rich study of the development of psychoanalysis, based upon many personal interviews.<br />
*[[Elisabeth Young-Bruehl|Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth]] (1992). ''Freud on Women: A Reader''. Norton. ISBN 0-393-30870-7.<br />
*Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, ''Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory & Practice'' (London: Routledge, 1995)<br />
* Isbister, J. N. "Freud, An Introduction to his Life and Work" Publisher: Polity Press: Cambridge, Oxford. (1985)<br />
*[[Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson]], ''The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory'', Ballantine Books (November 2003), ISBN 0-345-45279-8<br />
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===Conceptual critiques===<br />
<br />
* Robert Aziz, ''The Syndetic Paradigm:The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung'' (2007), a refereed publication of The [[State University of New York Press]]. ISBN-13:978-0-7914-6982-8.<br />
* [[Mortimer Adler|Adler, Mortimer J.]], ''What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology'' (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937). (A philosophical critique from an Aristotelian/Thomistic point of view.)<br />
<br />
* Cioffi, Frank. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998.<br />
<br />
* [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze, Gilles]] and [[Félix Guattari|Guattari, Félix]], ''Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia'', trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). (This first volume of the famous two-part work (also subtitled ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'') [[wiktionary:polemic|polemic]]ises Freud's argument that the Oedipal complex determines subjectivity. It is also, therefore, a staunch critique of the [[Lacan]]ian 'return to Freud.)<br />
<br />
* [[Henri Ellenberger]], ''The Discovery of the [[Unconscious mind|Unconscious]]: the History and Evolution of Dynamic [[Psychiatry]]'' (London: Penguin, 1970). (An extensive account and sensitive critique of Freudian metapsychology.) (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger)<br />
<br />
* Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.<br />
<br />
* [[Hans Eysenck|Eysenck, H. J.]] and Wilson, G. D. ''The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories'', Methuen, London (1973).<br />
<br />
* Eysenck, Hans, ''Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'' (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1986).<br />
<br />
*Hobson, J. Allan Hobson, ''Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN 0-19-280482-0. (Critique of Freud's dream theory in terms of current neuroscience)<br />
<br />
* Johnston, Thomas, ''Freud and Political Thought'' (New York: Citadel, 1965). (One of the more accessible accounts of the import of Freudianism for political theory.)<br />
<br />
* [[Sarah Kofman|Kofman, Sarah]], ''The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings'' (Ithaca, NY, & London: Cornell University Press, 1985).<br />
<br />
* Simonsen, Sean "I'm Okay, Freud is a Crackpot: Collected Essays on Denial" [http://www.standlikearock.com/forums "Stand Like A Rock"]<br />
<br />
* [[Herbert Marcuse|Marcuse, Herbert]], ''Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud'' (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974). (Mentioned above. For a good review, see Stirk, Peter M. R., ‘''Eros and Civilization'' revisited’, ''History of the Human Sciences'', 12 (1), 1999, pp. 73&ndash;90.)<br />
<br />
* Mitchell, Juliet. ''Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis'' Originally published in 1974; Basic Books reissue (2000) ISBN 0-465-04608-8<br />
<br />
* [[Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel|Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine]] & Grunberger, Béla. ''Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion.'' (London: Free Association Books, 1986)<br />
<br />
* Neu, Jerome (ed.), ''The Cambridge Companion to Freud'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). (A good conceptual overview.)<br />
<br />
* [[Paul Ricoeur|Ricoeur, Paul]], ''Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation'', trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972). <br />
<br />
*—, ''The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics'', ed. Don Ihde (London: Continuum, 2004). (A critical examination of the import of Freud for philosophy.)<br />
<br />
* Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers (New York: Random House, 1975).<br />
<br />
* [[Thomas Szasz|Szasz, Thomas]]. ''Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry'', Syracuse University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8156-0247-2. <br />
<br />
* Torrey, E. Fuller (1992). Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture. New York, NY : HarperCollins.<br />
* [[Valentin Voloshinov|Voloshinov, Valentin]]. ''Freudianism: A Marxist critique'', Academic Press (1976) ISBN 0-12-723250-8<br />
<br />
* Wollheim, Richard, ''Freud'', 2nd edn. (London: Fontana, 1991). (A good starting point.)<br />
<br />
===Biographies===<br />
<br />
The area of biography has been especially contentious in the [[historiography]] of psychoanalysis, for two primary reasons: first, following his death, significant portions of his personal papers were for several decades made available only at the permission of his biological and intellectual heirs (his daughter, Anna Freud, was extremely protective of her father's reputation); second, much of the data and theory of Freudian psychoanalysis hinges upon the personal testimony of Freud himself, and so to challenge Freud's legitimacy or honesty has been seen by many as an attack on the roots of his enduring work.<br />
<br />
The first biographies of Freud were written by Freud himself: his ''On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement'' (1914) and ''An Autobiographical Study'' (1924) provided much of the basis for discussions by later biographers, including "debunkers" (as they contain a number of prominent omissions and potential misrepresentations). A few of the major biographies on Freud to come out over the 20th century were:<br />
*Helen Walker Puner, ''Freud: His Life and His Mind'' (1947) &mdash; Puner's "facts" were often shaky at best but she was remarkably insightful with regard to Freud's unanalyzed relationship to his mother, Amalia. <br />
<br />
* [[Ernest Jones]], ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud'', 3 vols. (1953&ndash;1958) &mdash; the first "authorized" biography of Freud, made by one of his former students with the authorization and assistance of Anna Freud, with the hope of "dispelling the myths" from earlier biographies. Though this is the most comprehensive biography of Freud, Jones has been accused of writing more of a hagiography than a history of Freud. Among his questionable assertions, Jones diagnosed his own analyst, Ferenczi, as "psychotic." In the same breath, Jones also maligned Otto Rank, Ferenczi's close friend and Jones's most important rival for leadership of the movement in the 1920s. <br />
<br />
* [[Henri Ellenberger]], ''The Discovery of the Unconscious'' (1970) &mdash; was the first book to, in a compelling way, attempt to situate Freud within the context of his time and intellectual thought, arguing that he was the intellectual heir of [[Franz Mesmer]] and that the genesis of his theory owed a large amount to the political context of turn of the 19th century Vienna. (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger) <br />
<br />
* Frank Sulloway, ''Freud: Biologist of the Mind'' (1979) &mdash; Sulloway, one of the first professional/academic historians to write a biography of Freud, positioned Freud within the larger context of the [[history of science]], arguing specifically that Freud was, in fact, a biologist in disguise (a "crypto-biologist", in Sulloway's terms), and sought to actively hide this.<br />
<br />
* [[Peter Gay]], ''Freud: A Life for Our Time'' (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988) &mdash; Gay's impressively scholarly work was published in part as a response to the anti-Freudian literature and the "Freud Wars" of the 1980s (see below). Gay's book is probably the best pro-Freud biography available, though he is not completely uncritical of his hero. His "Bibliographical Essay" at the end of the volume provides astute evaluations of the voluminous literature on Freud up to the mid-1980s.<br />
<br />
* Breger, Louis. "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision." (New York: Wiley, 2000). Though written from a psychoanalytic point of view (the author is a former President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis), this is a "warts and all" life of Sigmund Freud. It corrects, in the light of historical research of recent decades, many (though not quite all) of several disputed traditional historical accounts of events uncritically recycled by Peter Gay. <br />
<br />
The creation of Freud biographies has itself even been written about at some length&mdash;see, for example, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "A History of Freud Biographies," in ''Discovering the History of Psychiatry'', edited by Mark S. Micale and [[Roy Porter]] (Oxford University Press, 1994).<br />
<br />
===Biographical critiques===<br />
<br />
* Bakan, David. ''Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition'', D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958; New York, Schocken Books, 1965; Dover Publications, 2004. ISBN 0-486-43767-1<br />
<br />
* Crews, F. C. ''Unauthorized Freud : doubters confront a legend'', New York, Viking 1998. ISBN 0-670-87221-0<br />
<br />
* Dolnick, Edward. ''Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis'' ISBN 0-684-82497-3<br />
<br />
* Dufresne, T. ''Killing Freud'', Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.<br />
<br />
* Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.<br />
<br />
* Eysenck, H. J. ''The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'', Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D. C., (1990) <br />
<br />
* Jurjevich, R. M. ''The Hoax of Freudism: A study of Brainwashing the American Professionals and Laymen'' Dorrance (1974) ISBN 0-8059-1856-6<br />
<br />
* LaPiere, R. T. ''The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of Western Character'' Greenwood Press (1974) ISBN 0-8371-7543-7<br />
<br />
* [[Jonathan Lear|Lear, Jonathan]]. ''Freud'' Routledge (2005) ISBN 0-415-31451-8<br />
<br />
* [[Emil_Ludwig|Ludwig, Emil]], ''Doctor Freud'', Manor Books, New York, 1973 <br />
<br />
* [[Kevin B. MacDonald|MacDonald, Kevin B]]. ''The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements'' Authorhouse (2002) ISBN 0-7596-7222-9<br />
<br />
* Macmillan, Malcolm. ''Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc'' MIT Press, 1996 ISBN 0-262-63171-7 [originally published by New Holland, 1991]<br />
<br />
* Scharnberg, Max. ''The non-authentic nature of Freud's observations'', Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993 ISBN 91-554-3122-4<br />
<br />
* Stannard, D. E. ''Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory'' Oxford University Press, Oxford (1980) ISBN 0-19-503044-3<br />
<br />
* Thornton, E. M. ''Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy'', Blond & Briggs, London (1983) ISBN 0-85634-139-8<br />
<br />
* Webster, Richard. ''Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis'' BasicBooks, 1995. ISBN 0-465-09579-8<br />
<br />
* Sonia Montero Padilla contributed to this page.<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==See also==<br />
===Topics===<br />
{{col-begin}}<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[American Psychoanalytic Association]]<br />
* [[Freudian slip]]<br />
* [[Freudo-Marxism]]<br />
* [[Neo-Freudian]]<br />
* [[Penis envy]]<br />
* [[Psychic energy]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalysis]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[History of hypnosis#Psychoanalysis and Hypnotherapy|Psychoanalysis and Hypnotherapy]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalytic literary criticism]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalytic theory]]<br />
* [[Psychodynamics]]<br />
* [[Psychological projection]]<br />
* [[Psychology of religion]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Psychosexual development]]<br />
** [[Oral stage]]<br />
** [[Anal stage]]<br />
** [[Phallic stage]]<br />
** [[Genital stage]]<br />
* [[Psychotherapy]]<br />
* [[Shame]]<br />
* [[Unconscious mind]]<br />
{{col-end}}<br />
<br />
===People===<br />
{{col-begin}}<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Alfred Adler|Adler, Alfred]]<br />
* [[Josef Breuer|Breuer, Josef]]<br />
* [[Edward L. Bernays|Edward Bernays]]<br />
* [[Jean-Martin Charcot|Charcot, Jean-Martin]]<br />
* [[Erik Erikson|Erikson, Erik]]<br />
* [[Wilhelm Fliess|Fliess, Wilhelm]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Viktor Frankl]]<br />
* [[Anna Freud|Freud, Anna]]<br />
* [[Georg Groddeck|Groddeck, Georg]]<br />
* [[Boris Sidis]]<br />
* [[Wilfred Bion]]<br />
* [[Karen Horney|Horney, Karen]]<br />
* [[Ernest Jones|Jones, Ernest]]<br />
* [[Carl Jung|Jung, Carl]]<br />
* [[Melanie Klein|Klein, Melanie]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]<br />
* [[Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson|Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff]]<br />
* [[Otto Rank|Rank, Otto]]<br />
* [[Wilhelm Reich|Reich, Wilhelm]]<br />
* [[Herbert Silberer|Silberer, Herbert]]<br />
* [[Charles Darwin|Darwin, Charles]]<br />
{{col-end}}<br />
<br />
==External links==<br />
{{commons|Sigmund Freud}}<br />
{{wikiquote}}<br />
{{wikisource author}}<br />
* [http://www.pribor.cz/ PŘÍBOR-Freud birth place]<br />
* [http://www.freud.org.uk/ Freud Museum in London]<br />
* [http://www.freudfile.org/ Sigmund Freud Life and Work]<br />
* [http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/phil/psychology/ScientificMethodInTheInterpretationOfDreams/Chap1.html Scientific Method in the Interpretation of Dreams]<br />
* [http://www.ipa.org.uk/ International Psychoanalytical Association, founded by Freud in 1910] <br />
* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4445608-99939,00.html Scientist or storyteller?]<br />
* [http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html International Network of Freud Critics]<br />
* [http://www.iceion.com/philo/philo.php?page=freud Freud's Philosophy]<br />
* [http://www.freud-museum.at/ Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, Vienna]<br />
* [https://docushop.at/en/detail.asp?p_id=301 Sigmund Freud Movie about Berggasse 19]<br />
* [http://www.positivehealth.com/permit/Articles/Regular/litt55.htm One Hundred Years of Sigmund Freud]<br />
* [http://atheisme.free.fr/Biographies/Freud_e.htm Sigmund Freud Biography and Quotations]<br />
* [http://www.britannica.com/original?content_id=1309 Sigmund Freud's article on Psychoanalysis from the 1926 (Thirteenth) edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica]<br />
* [http://www.sfi-frankfurt.de/ Sigmund-Freud-Institut]<br />
* [http://www.freudarchives.org/ Freud Archives at Library of Congress]<br />
* [http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/freud_e.html ''Freud's Unwritten Case: The Patient "E."'' by Douglas A. Davis]<br />
*[http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com/Article/The-Darwin-of-the-Mind/139 The Darwin of the Mind]<br />
<br />
* {{gutenberg author| id=Sigmund+Freud | name=Sigmund Freud}}<br />
* [http://www.robertaziz.com Website of leading Freud-Jungian scholar/ author, Dr. Robert Aziz]<br />
* {{es icon}} [http://www.enfocarte.com/7.31/filosofia1.html Nietzsche y Freud; la ficcion del sujeto y las seducciones de la gramatica] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD<br />
* {{es icon}} [http://www.box.net/index.php?rm=box_download_shared_file&file_id=f_44672761&shared_name=9ykgpnv487 La influencia de Nietzsche sobre Freud] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD<br />
*[http://essays.quotidiana.org/freud/ Essays by Freud at Quotidiana.org]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Sigmund Freud]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalytic theory]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian psychiatrists]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian psychologists]]<br />
[[Category:Developmental psychologists]]<br />
[[Category:Freud family]]<br />
[[Category:Psychodynamics]]<br />
[[Category:History of mental health]]<br />
[[Category:History of neuroscience]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy of sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian philosophers]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysts]]<br />
[[Category:20th century philosophers]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian atheists]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian emigrants]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian Jews]]<br />
[[Category:Czech expatriates]]<br />
[[Category:Jewish scientists]]<br />
[[Category:People from Vienna]]<br />
[[Category:Doctors who committed suicide]]<br />
[[Category:Drug-related suicides]]<br />
[[Category:Deaths by euthanasia]]<br />
[[Category:Psychology writers]]<br />
[[Category:1856 births]]<br />
[[Category:1939 deaths]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]<br />
<br />
=====Where=====<br />
[[Freud]] was born in Moravia in 1856 but his family moved to Vienna in 1860.<br />
<br />
The city remained his home until 1938 when the ''Anschluss'', the incorporation of Austria into the Nazi Reich, obliged him to make a reluctant departure for London.<br />
<br />
=====Student=====<br />
[[Freud]] graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1881, and his early research and publications dealt with anatomy and physiology.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
=====References=====<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:People|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Sigmund Freud|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Freudian psychology|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Looking Awry|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
<br />
{{Encore}}<br />
:* [[Freud, S.]], 3''n'', 11''n'', 15, 37n, 50, 53, 55, 61-62, 66, 77, 80, 89, 91, 96, 100, 105, 108-9, 112, 115, 120, 121, 126 <br />
:: [[Lacan]] and, 41, 47, 97 <br />
:: on [[perversion]], 86-87 <br />
:: on [[reality]], 55-56 <br />
:: [[women]] and, 72, 74-75, 80, 86-87, 99, 127</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Sigmund_Freud&diff=43776Sigmund Freud2019-04-15T23:07:13Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Sigmund Freud''', born '''Sigismund Schlomo Freud''' (May 6 1856 &ndash; September 23 1939), was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and [[psychiatrist]] who co-founded the [[psychoanalysis|psychoanalytic school]] of [[psychology]]. Freud is best known for his theories of the [[unconscious mind]], especially involving the mechanism of [[Psychological repression|repression]]; his redefinition of [[sexual desire]] as mobile and directed towards a wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic techniques, especially his understanding of [[transference]] in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of [[dream]]s as sources of insight into unconscious desires.<br />
<br />
He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential — popularizing such notions as the unconscious, [[defence mechanism|defense mechanism]]s, [[Freudian slips]] and [[dream symbolism]] — while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as [[literature]] ([[Kafka]]), [[film]], [[Marxism|Marxist]] and [[feminist]] theories, [[literary criticism]], [[philosophy]], and [[psychology]]. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. <br />
<br />
==Biography==<br />
===Early life===<br />
Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in Příbor (''Freiberg'' in German), Moravia (then Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic), on 6 May 1856. His father Jacob was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother Amalia was 21. Owing to his intellect, which was obvious from an early stage of his childhood, his parents favored him over his siblings, and even though they were poor they offered everything to give him a proper education. As a result, Freud did extremely well during his first 8 years of school, but at the age of 17, he had to move to the University in Vienna because of the strong anti-Semitism in Austria at the time, at which time his grades plummeted.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Medical school===<br />
In 1874, the concept of "[[psychodynamics]]" was seeded with the publication of ''Lectures on Physiology'' by German physiologist [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Ernst von Brücke]] who, in coordination with physicist [[Hermann von Helmholtz]], one of the formulators of the [[first law of thermodynamics]] ([[conservation of energy]]), supposed that all living organisms are energy-systems also governed by this principle. During this year, at the [[University of Vienna]], Brucke was also coincidentally the supervisor for first-year medical student Sigmund Freud who naturally adopted this new “dynamic” physiology. In his ''Lectures on Physiology'', Brücke set forth the radical view that the living organism is a [[dynamic system]] to which the laws of [[chemistry]] and [[physics]] apply.<ref name="Hall">{{cite book | last = Hall | first = Calvin, S.| title = A Primer in Freudian Psychology | publisher = Meridian Book | year = 1954 | id = ISBN 0452011833}}</ref> This was the starting point for Freud's dynamic psychology of the mind and its relation to the [[unconscious]].<ref name="Hall" /><ref>[http://www.humanthermodynamics.com/Freud.html Freud's Psycho Dynamic Theory and Thermodynamics] [1873-1923] - Institute of Human Thermodynamics</ref> The origins of Freud’s basic model, based on the fundmentals of chemistry and physics, according to [[John Bowlby]], stems from [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Brücke]], [[Meynert]], [[Josef Breuer|Breuer]], [[Helmholtz]], and [[Herbart]].<ref name="Bowlby">{{cite book | last = Bowlby | first = John | title = Attachment and Loss: Vol I, 2nd Ed. | publisher = Basic Books | pages = 13-23| year = 1999 | id = ISBN 0-465-00543-8}}</ref><br />
<br />
===Later life===<br />
Freud married in 1886, after the opening of a private clinic, specializing in nerve and brain damage. After using [[hypnosis]] on his neurotic patients for a long period, he abandoned this form of treatment, in favor of a better treatment, where the patient talked through his or her problem.<br />
<br />
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychotherapist, told a colleague about his first visit with Sigmund Freud in the year 1907. Jung had much that he wanted to talk about with Freud, and he spoke with intense animation for three whole hours. Finally Freud interrupted him and, to Jung's astonishment, proceeded to group the contents of Jung's monologue into several precise categories that enabled them to spend their remaining hours together in a more profitable give-and-take. <ref>Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited and abridged by Lionell Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), p. 253.</ref><br />
<br />
Freud held the opinion (based on personal experience and observation) that sexual activity was incompatible with the accomplishing of any great work. Since he felt that the great work of creating and establishing psychotherapy was his destiny, he told his wife that they could no longer engage in sexual relations. Indeed from about the age of forty until his death Freud was absolutely celibate “in order to sublimate the libido for creative purposes,” according to his biographer [[Ernest Jones]].<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, there has been persistent gossip, which has always been staunchly denied by Freud loyalists, about the possibility that around this time a romantic liaison had blossomed between Freud, and his sister-in-law, who had moved in with the Freuds in 1896. This rumour of an illicit relationship has been most notably propelled forward by [[Carl Jung|C. G. Jung]], Freud's disciple and later his archrival, who had claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed the affair to him. (This claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung's part.) It has been suggested that the affair resulted in a pregnancy and subsequently an abortion for Miss Bernays.<br />
<br />
A hotel log dated [[August 13]], [[1898]] seems to support the allegation of an affair.<ref>{{cite news| first=Ralph|last= Blumenthal| title=Hotel log hints at desire that Freud didn't repress| publisher=International Herald Tribune| date=24 December 2006| url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/24/europe/web.1224freud.php}}</ref><br />
<br />
In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). During this time Freud was involved in the task of exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), and "he also recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm, and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67). Corey (2001) considers this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's life.<br />
<br />
After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1901, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. Freud often chose to disregard the criticisms of those who were skeptical of his theories, however, and even gained a few direct opponents as a result,{{Fact|date=March 2007}} the most famous being [[Carl Jung]], who was originally in support of Freud's ideas. <br />
<br />
In 1930 Freud received the [[Goethe Prize]] in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture. Three years later the [[Nazis]] took control of [[Germany]] and Freud's books featured prominently amongst those burned by the Nazis. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the [[Anschluss]]. This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the [[Gestapo]]. Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom". He and his family left Vienna in June 1938 and traveled to [[London]]. <br />
<br />
A heavy cigar smoker, Freud endured more than 30 operations during his life due to [[mouth cancer]]. In September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend [[Max Schur]] to assist him in suicide. After reading [[Balzac]]'s ''[[La Peau de chagrin]]'' in a single sitting he said, "My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more." Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud's death on September 23, 1939.<ref>{{cite book| last=Gay| first= Peter| year=1988| title=Freud: A Life for Our Time| location=New York| publisher= W. W. Norton & Company |authorlink=Peter Gay|}}</ref> <br />
Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at [[Golders Green Crematorium]] during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author [[Stefan Zweig]]. His ashes were later placed in the crematorium's [[columbarium]]. They rest in an ancient Greek urn which Freud had received as a present from [[Marie Bonaparte]] and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After Martha Freud's death in [[1951]], her ashes were also placed in that urn. Golders Green Crematorium has since also become the final resting place for [[Anna Freud]] and her lifelong friend [[Dorothy Burlingham]], as well as for several other members of the Freud family.<br />
<br />
==Innovations==<br />
Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways. He simultaneously developed a theory of how the human [[mind]] is organized and operates internally, and how human [[behavior]] both conditions and results from this particular theoretical understanding. This lead him to favor certain clinical techniques for attempting to help cure [[Mental illness|psychopathology]].<br />
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===Early work===<br />
[[Image:Tavistock and Freud statue.JPG|thumb|300px|right|Sigmund Freud memorial in [[Hampstead]], north London. Sigmund and [[Anna Freud|Anna]] Freud lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens, directly opposite the statue; the house is now a museum dedicated to his life and work. The building behind the statue is the [[Tavistock Clinic]], a major psychiatric institution.]]Due to [[Neurology]] and [[Psychiatry]] not being recognized as distinct medical fields at the time of Sigmund Freud's training, the medical degree he obtained after studying for six years at the [[University of Vienna]] board certified him in both Neurology and Psychiatry, although he is far more well-known for his work in the latter. As far as neurology went, Freud was an early researcher on the topic of [[neurophysiology]], specifically [[cerebral palsy]], which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed far before other researchers in his day began to notice and study it. He also suggested that [[William Little (English surgeon)|William Little]], the man who first identified [[cerebral palsy]], was wrong about lack of [[oxygen]] during the birth process being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom of the problem. It was not until the 1980s that Freud's speculations were confirmed by more modern research.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}<br />
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Freud was an early user and proponent of [[cocaine]] as a stimulant as well as [[analgesic]]. He wrote several articles on the [[antidepressant]] qualities of the drug and he was influenced by his friend and confidant [[Wilhelm Fliess]], who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the "nasal reflex neurosis." Fliess operated on Freud and a number of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, including [[Emma Eckstein]], whose surgery proved disastrous. <br />
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Freud felt that cocaine would work as a cure-all for many disorders and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca," explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend [[Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow]] to help him overcome a morphine [[addiction]] he had acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also recommended it to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on obtaining [[scientific priority]] for discovering cocaine's [[anesthesia|anesthetic]] properties (of which Freud was aware but on which he had not written extensively), after [[Karl Koller]], a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, presented a report to a medical society in 1884 outlining the ways in which cocaine could be used for delicate [[Ophthalmic|eye]] surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early ambition. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events, which later biographers have dubbed "The Cocaine Incident." <br />
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Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or [[psychoanalysis]], was to bring to [[consciousness]] repressed thoughts and feelings. According to some of his successors, including his daughter Anna Freud, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to develop a stronger [[Ego, super-ego, and id|ego]]; according to others, notably [[Jacques Lacan]], the goal of therapy is to lead the [[analysand]] to a full acknowledgment of his or her inability to satisfy the most basic desires. <br />
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Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in [[free association]] and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, [[transference]], the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents.<br />
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The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to [[Josef Breuer|Joseph Breuer]]. Freud actually credits Breuer with the discovery of the psychoanalytical method. One case started this phenomenon that would shape the field of psychology for decades to come, the case of [[Anna O.]] In 1880 a young girl came to Breuer with symptoms of what was then called [[female hysteria]]. Anna O. was a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman. She presented with symptoms such as paralysis of the limbs, [[Dissociative identity disorder|split personality]] and amnesia; today these symptoms are known as [[conversion disorder]]. After many doctors had given up and accused Anna O. of faking her symptoms, Breuer decided to treat her sympathetically, which he did with all of his patients. He started to hear her mumble words during what he called states of absence. Eventually Breuer started to recognize some of the words and wrote them down. He then hypnotized her and repeated the words to her; Breuer found out that the words were associated with her father's illness and death. <br />
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In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique". The traditional story, based on Freud's later accounts of this period, is that as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but after having heard a patient tell the story about Freud's personal friend being the victimizer, Freud concluded that his patients were fantasizing the abuse scenes. <br />
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In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from ''unconscious'' memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients (one third of whom were men). However a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates that these patients did not report early childhood sexual abuse as he later claimed: rather, he arrived at his findings by analytically inferring the supposed incidents, using a procedure that was heavily dependent on the symbolic interpretation of somatic symptoms.<br />
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===The unconscious===<br />
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Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his argument for the existence of an [[unconscious mind]]. During the 19th century, the dominant trend in [[western world|Western]] thought was [[positivism]], which subscribed to the belief that people could ascertain real knowledge concerning themselves and their environment and judiciously exercise control over both. Freud, however, suggested that such declarations of free will are in fact delusions; that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts.<br />
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The concept of the unconscious as proposed by Freud was considered by some to be groundbreaking in that he proposed that awareness existed in layers and that some thoughts occurred "below the surface." Nevertheless, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others, pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, [[William James]], in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".<ref>Meyer (2005, 217).</ref> [[Boris Sidis]], a Jewish Russian who escaped to the USA in 1887, and studied under [[William James]], wrote ''The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society'' in 1898, followed by ten or more works over the next twenty five years on similar topics to the works of Freud.<br />
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Moreover, the historian of psychology Mark Altschule wrote: "It is difficult - or perhaps impossible - to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance."<ref>{{cite book| last=Altschule| first= M| year=1977| title=Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior| location=New York| publisher= Wiley| pages= 199}}, cited in [http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=57 Allen Esterson, Freud returns?]</ref> Freud's advance was not, then, to uncover the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it.<br />
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[[Dream]]s, which he called the "royal road to the unconscious," provided the best access to our unconscious life and the best illustration of its "logic," which was different from the logic of conscious thought. Freud developed his first [[topology]] of the psyche in ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'' (1899) in which he proposed the argument that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The [[preconscious]] was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought&mdash;that which we could access with a little effort. Thus for Freud, the ideals of [[the Enlightenment]], positivism and [[rationalism]], could be achieved through understanding, transforming, and mastering the unconscious, rather than through denying or repressing it.<br />
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Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is "[[Psychological repression|repression]]." According to Freud, people often experience thoughts and feelings that are so painful that they cannot bear them. Such thoughts and feelings&mdash;and associated memories&mdash;could not, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but could be banished from consciousness. Thus they come to constitute the unconscious. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that individual patients repress different things. Moreover, Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a non-conscious act (in other words, it did not occur through people willing away certain thoughts or feelings). Freud supposed that what people repressed was in part determined by their unconscious. In other words, the unconscious was for Freud both a cause and effect of repression.<br />
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Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the [[descriptive unconscious]], the [[dynamic unconscious]], and the [[system unconscious]]. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific [[social construct|construct]], referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement. <br />
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Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the [[Ego, super-ego, and id]] (discussed below). Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.<br />
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===Psychosexual development===<br />
{{main|Psychosexual development}}<br />
Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient [[mythology]] and contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the [[Oedipus complex]] after the famous [[Greek tragedy]] ''[[Oedipus the King|Oedipus Rex]]'' by [[Sophocles]]. “I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood,” Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification (cf. ''[[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]''). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire [[incest]] and must repress that desire. The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to [[cultural anthropology|anthropological]] studies of [[totemism]] and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal [[Oedipal conflict]].<br />
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Freud originally posited childhood [[sexual abuse]] as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory, noting that he had found many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events. During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual etiology of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had been sexually abused by their fathers, and was quite explicit about discussing several patients whom he knew to have been abused.<ref>{{cite book |title=Freud: A Life for Our Time| pages=p.95|}}</ref><br />
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Freud also believed that the [[libido]] developed in individuals by changing its object, a process designed by the concept of ''[[sublimation (psychology)|sublimation]]''. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development&mdash;first in the [[oral stage]] (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the [[anal stage]] (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the [[phallic stage]]. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the [[Oedipus Complex]]) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The lesser known [[Electra complex]] refers to such a fixation on the father.) The repressive or dormant [[The_Latency_Phase_%286-12_years_of_age%29|latency stage]] of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature [[genital stage]] of psychosexual development. <br />
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Freud's way of interpretation has been called phallocentric by many contemporary thinkers. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious always desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of castration - losing their phallus or masculinity to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus - an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs. For Freud, desire is always defined in the negative term of lack - you always desire what you don't have or what you are not, and it is very unlikely that you will fulfill this desire. Thus his psychoanalysis treatment is meant to teach the patient to cope with his or her unsatisfiable desires.<br />
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===Ego, super-ego, and id===<br />
{{main|Ego, super-ego, and id}}<br />
In his later work, Freud proposed that the psyche could be divided into three parts: [[Ego, super-ego, and id]]. <br />
Freud discussed this structural model of the mind in the 1920 essay ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'', and fully elaborated it in ''[[The Ego and The Id]]'' (1923), where he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (conscious, unconscious, preconscious).<br />
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Freud acknowledges that his use of the term Id (or the It) derives from the writings of [[Georg Grodeck]]. It is interesting to note that the term Id appears in the earliest writing of [[Boris Sidis]], attributed to [[William James]], as early as 1898.<br />
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===Defense mechanisms===<br />
According to Kirrilee Arb, the [[defense mechanisms]] are the methods by which the ego can deal with conflicts between the super-ego and the id. The use of defense mechanisms may attenuate the conflict between the id and super-ego, but their overuse or reuse rather than confrontation can lead to either anxiety or [[guilt]] which may result in psychological disorders such as depression. His daughter [[Anna Freud]] had done the most significant work on this field, yet she credited Sigmund with defense mechanisms as he began the work. The defense mechanisms include [[denial]], [[reaction formation]], [[Displacement (psychology)|displacement]], [[psychological repression|repression]]/[[suppression]] (the proper term), [[psychological projection|projection]], [[intellectualization]], [[rationalization (psychology)|rationalization]], compensation, [[sublimation (psychology)|sublimation]] and [[regressive emotionality]].<br />
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*''Denial'' occurs when someone fends off awareness of an unpleasant truth or of a reality that is a threat to the ego. For example, a student may have received a bad grade on a report card but tells himself that grades don't matter. (Some early writers argued for a striking parallel between Freudian denial and [[Nietzsche]]'s ideas of ''[[ressentiment]]'' and the ''revaluation of values'' that he attributed to "herd" or "slave" morality.)<br />
*''Reaction formation'' takes place when a person takes the opposite approach consciously compared to what that person wants unconsciously. For example, someone may engage in violence against another race because, that person claims, the members of the race are inferior, when unconsciously it is that very person who feels inferior.<br />
*''Displacement'' takes place when someone redirects emotion from a "dangerous" object to a "safe" one, such as punching a pillow when one is angry at a friend.<br />
*''[[Psychological repression|Repression]]'' occurs when an experience is so painful (such as war trauma) that it is unconsciously forced from consciousness, while ''suppression'' is a conscious effort to do the same.<br />
*''[[Psychological projection]]'' occurs when a person "projects" his or her own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings — basically parts of oneself — onto someone or something else. Since the person is experiencing particular desires, feelings, thoughts, or anxieties, s/he is more prone to [[attribution theory|attribute]] those same characteristics to the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others.<br />
*''Intellectualization'' involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event, by focusing on rational and factual components of the situation. <br />
*''Rationalization'' involves constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. For example, Jim may drink red wine because he is an alcoholic, but he tells himself he drinks it because it has some health benefits, in order to avoid facing his alcoholism.<br />
*''Compensation'' occurs when someone takes up one behaviour because one cannot accomplish another behaviour. For example, the second born child may clown around to get attention since the older child is already an accomplished scholar.<br />
*''Sublimation'' is the channeling of impulses to socially accepted behaviours. For instance, an aggressive or homicidal person may join the military as a cover for their violent behavior.<br />
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===The life and death instincts===<!-- This section is linked from [[Erich Fromm]] --><br />
Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive ([[Eros (Freud)|Eros]]) (incorporating the sex drive) and the death drive ([[Thanatos]]). Freud's description of Eros and Libido included all creative, life-producing drives. The [[death drive]] (or death instinct) represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm, or, ultimately, of non-existence. The presence of the Death Drive was only recognized in his later years, and the contrast between the two represents a revolution in his manner of thinking. The death instinct is also referred to as the [[Nirvana]] Principle.<br />
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It should be added that these ideas owe a great deal to both Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in ''The World as Will and Representation'', describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive. The life drive clearly owes much to Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in ''The Birth of Tragedy''. Freud was an avid reader of both philosophers and acknowledged their influence.<br />
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===Social psychology===<br />
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[[Image:PICT4139.JPG|thumb|250px|Freud boarding a Lufthansa flight in the 1930s. (Memorial to the German Resistance, Berlin)]]<br />
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Freud gave explanations of the genesis of religion in his writings, included in a reflection on [[crowd psychology]]. In ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (1913), he proposed that humans originally banded together in “primal hordes”, consisting of a male, a number of females and the offspring of this [[polygamous]] arrangement. According to Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, a male child early in life has sexual desires for his mother – the [[Oedipus Complex]] – which he held to be [[Universality (philosophy)|universal]]. [[Ethnology|Ethnologists]] would later criticize this point, leading to ethno-psychoanalytic studies. According to Freud, the father is protective, so his sons love him, but they are also jealous of their father for his relationship with their mothers. Finding that individually they cannot defeat the father-leader, they band together, kill and eat him in a ritual meal, thereby ingesting the substance of the father’s hated power – but their subsequent guilt leads the sons to elevate their father's memory and to worship him. The [[super-ego]] then takes the place of the father as the source of internalized authority. A ban was then put upon [[incest]] and upon [[marriage]] within the clan, and symbolic animal [[sacrifice]] was substituted for the ritual killing of a human being.<br />
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In ''[[Moses and Monotheism]]'' (1939) Freud reconstructed biblical history in accord with his general theory, but many biblical scholars and historians would not accept his account since it defied commonly accepted views on the [[Jewish history|history of Judaism]] and of dynastic Egypt. However, this book remains interesting as an interpretation of [[leadership]] based on [[charisma]] and [[mass psychology]], using the [[Prophet]]ic figure of Moses. His ideas about [[religion]] were also developed in ''[[The Future of an Illusion]]'' (1927). When Freud spoke of religion as an [[illusion]], he maintained that it is a [[fantastic]] structure from which a man must be set free if he is to grow to [[maturity]]; and in his treatment of the unconscious he moved toward [[atheism]]. In this sense, Freud approached the [[Marxism|Marxist theory]] of [[Marx's theory of alienation|alienation]]. Freud isolated two main principles: [[Death instinct|Thanatos]] is the drive towards the dissolution of all life, whereas [[Eros (love)|Eros]] is to strive towards stopping that drive. When one goal is reached, the other becomes out-of-reach, and vice versa. <br />
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In ''"[[Group Psychology]] and Ego Analysis"'' (''Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analysis'', 1920), Freud explored crowd psychology, continuing [[Gustave Le Bon]]'s early work. When the individual joins a crowd, he ceases repressing his instincts, and thus relapses into [[primitive culture]], according to Freud's analysis. However, crowds must be distinguished into natural and organized crowds, following [[William McDougall (psychologist)|William McDougall]]'s distinction. Thus, if intellectual skills (the capacity to [[doubt]] and to distance oneself) are systematically reduced when the individual joins a mass, he may eventually be "morally enlightened". Prefiguring ''Moses and Monotheism'' and ''The Future of an Illusion'', he states that the love relationship between the leader and the masses, in the Church or in the Army, are only an "idealist transformation of the conditions existing in the primitive horde". Freud then compares the leader's relationship with the crowd to a relation of [[hypnosis]], a force to which he relates [[Mana]]. Pessimistic about humanity's chances of [[liberty]], Freud writes that "the leader of the crowd always incarnates the dreaded primitive father, the crowd always wants to be dominated by an unlimited power, it is grasping at the highest degree for [[authority]] or, to use [[Gustave Le Bon|Le Bon]]'s expression, it is hungry for subservience".<br />
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According to Freud, [[self-identification]] to a common figure, the leader, explained the phenomenon of masses' obedience. Each individual connected themselves vertically to the same ideal figure (or [[idea]]), each one thus has the same self-ideal, and hence identify together (horizontal relation). Freud also quoted [[Wilfred Trotter]]'s ''The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War'' (1914). Along with ''Moses and Monotheism'', ''Massenpsychologie...'' would be one of the articles most quoted by Wilhelm Reich and the [[Frankfurt School]] in its [[Freudo-Marxism|Freudo-Marxist]] synthesis.<br />
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==Freud's legacy==<br />
[[image:1freud-enlargement.JPG|thumb|left|200px|Freud on the Austrian 50-Schilling Note]]<br />
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=== Psychotherapy ===<br />
{{main|Psychotherapy}}<br />
Freud's theories and research methods were controversial during his life and still are so today, but few dispute his huge impact on [[psychologists]] and the academically inclined.<br />
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Most importantly, Freud popularized the "talking-cure"&mdash;an idea that a person could solve problems simply by talking over them, something that was almost unheard of in the 19th century. Even though many psychotherapists today tend to reject the specifics of Freud's theories, this basic mode of treatment comes largely from his work.<br />
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Most of Freud's specific theories&mdash;like his stages of psychosexual development&mdash;and especially his methodology, have fallen out of favor in modern [[experimental psychology]].<br />
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Some psychotherapists, however, still follow an approximately Freudian system of treatment. Many more have modified his approach, or joined one of the schools that branched from his original theories (see [[Neo-Freudian]]). Still others reject his theories entirely, although their practice may still reflect his influence.<br />
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[[Psychoanalysis]] today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life.<br />
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=== Philosophy ===<br />
While he saw himself as a scientist, yet failed to employ any aspect of the scientific method, he greatly admired [[Theodor Lipps]], a philosopher and main supporter of the ideas of the subconscious and empathy.<ref>{{cite journal| last=Pigman| first= G.W.| url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7628894&dopt=Abstract | title=Freud and the history of empathy| journal=The International journal of psycho-analysis| year= 1995| month=April| volume=76 (Pt 2)| pages=237-56}}</ref> Freud's theories have had a tremendous impact on the [[humanities]]--especially on the [[Frankfurt school]] and [[critical theory]]. Freud's model of the mind is often criticized as an unsubstantiated challenge to the [[Age of Enlightenment|enlightenment]] model of rational [[Agency (philosophy)|agency]], which was a key element of much [[modern philosophy]].<br />
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* '''Rationality'''. While many enlightenment thinkers viewed rationality as both an unproblematic ideal and a defining feature of man, Freud's model of the mind drastically reduced the scope and power of reason. In Freud's view, reasoning occurs in the conscious mind--the ego--but this is only a small part of the whole. The mind also contains the hidden, irrational elements of id and superego, which lie outside of conscious control, drive behavior, and motivate conscious activities. As a result, these structures call into question humans' ability to act purely on the basis of reason, since lurking motives are also always at play. Moreover, this model of the mind makes rationality itself suspect, since it may be motivated by hidden urges or societal forces (e.g. defense mechanisms, where reasoning becomes "rationalizing").<br />
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* '''Transparency of Self'''. Another common assumption in pre-Freudian philosophy was that people have immediate and unproblematic access to themselves. Emblematic of this position is [[René Descartes]]' famous [[dictum]], "''Cogito ergo sum''" ("I think, therefore I am"). For Freud, however, many central aspects of a person remain radically inaccessible to the conscious mind (without the aid of psychotherapy), which undermines the once unquestionable status of first-person knowledge.<br />
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===Critical reactions===<br />
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Although Freud's theories were quite influential, they came under widespread criticism during his lifetime and afterward. A paper by [[Lydiard H. Horton]], read in 1915 at a joint meeting of the [[American Psychological Association]] and the [[New York Academy of Sciences]], called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and noted that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psycho analytically". [[A. C. Grayling]], writing in ''The Guardian'' in 2002, said "Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade....But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him." [[Peter D. Kramer]], a [[psychiatrist]] and faculty member of [[Brown Medical School]], said "I'm afraid [Freud] doesn't hold up very well at all. It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality." A 2006 article in [[Newsweek magazine]] called him "history's most debunked doctor."<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandthejudaeochristiantradition.html | title = Freud in Our Midst | publisher = Newsweek | date = 27 March 2006 | accessdate = 2007-03-27}}</ref><br />
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According to Richard Webster, author of ''Why Freud Was Wrong'' (1995):<br />
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{{cquote|Freud made no substantial intellectual discoveries. He was the creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilisation. In creating his particular pseudo-science, Freud developed an autocratic, anti-empirical intellectual style which has contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ills of our own era. His original theoretical system, his habits of thought and his entire attitude to scientific research are so far removed from any responsible method of inquiry that no intellectual approach basing itself upon these is likely to endure.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandthejudaeochristiantradition.html | title = Freud and the Judaeo-Christian tradition | publisher = The Times Literary Supplement | date = 23 May 1997 | accessdate = 2007-03-19}}</ref>}}<br />
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Other critics, like Dr. [[Frederick C. Crews]], Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of ''The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute'' (1995), are even more blunt: <br />
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{{cquote|He was a charlatan. In 1896 he published three papers on the ideology of hysteria claiming that he had cured X number of patients. First it was thirteen and then it was eighteen. And he had cured them all by presenting them, or rather by obliging them to remember, that they had been sexually abused as children. In 1897 he lost faith in this theory, but he'd told his colleagues that this was the way to cure hysteria. So he had a scientific obligation to tell people about his change of mind. But he didn't. He didn't even hint at it until 1905, and even then he wasn't clear. Meanwhile, where were the thirteen patients? Where were the eighteen patients? You read the Freud - Fleiss letters and you find that Freud's patients were leaving at the time. By 1897 he didn't have any patients worth mentioning, and he hadn't cured any of them, and he knew it perfectly well. Well, if a scientist did that today, of course he would be stripped of his job. He would be stripped of his research funds. He would be disgraced for life. But Freud was so brilliant at controlling his own legend that people can hear charges like this, and even admit that they're true, and yet not have their faith in the system of thought affected in any way.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Crews/crews-con3.html | title = Frederick Crews Interview | publisher = Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley| year = 1999 | first = Harry | last = Kreisler | accessdate = 2007-03-19}}</ref>}}<br />
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Another frequently criticized aspect of Freud's theories is his model of psychosexual development. Some have attacked Freud's claim that infants are sexual beings, and, implicitly, Freud's expanded notion of sexuality. Others have accepted Freud's expanded notion of sexuality, but have argued that this pattern of development is not universal, nor necessary for the development of a healthy adult. Instead, they have emphasized the social and environmental sources of patterns of development. Moreover, they call attention to [[social dynamics]] Freud de-emphasized or ignored, such as class relations. This branch of Freudian critique owes a great deal to the work of [[Herbert Marcuse]]. <br />
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Freud has also come under fire from many [[feminist]] critics. Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "[[Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness]]"). Some feminists, however, have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in [[Western culture]] back decades, and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority. Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a penis) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of [[misogyny]]. Terms such as "[[penis envy]]" and "[[castration anxiety]]" contributed to discouraging women from entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on [[Ida Bauer]] such as "''This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen''" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance'<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28">S.E. 7. pp28</ref> implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "''I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable''"<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28" /><br />
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On the other hand, [[feminist theory|feminist theorists]] such as [[Juliet Mitchell]], [[Nancy Chodorow]], [[Jessica Benjamin]], [[Jane Gallop]], and [[Jane Flax]] have argued that psychoanalytic theory is essentially related to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism. Freud's views are still being questioned by people concerned about women's equality. Another feminist who finds potential use of Freud's theories in the feminist movement is [[Shulamith Firestone]]. In "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism", she discusses how Freudianism is essentially completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud wrote "penis", the word should be replaced with "power". <br />
<br />
Dr. Jurgen von Scheidt speculated that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his cocaine use.<ref>{{cite journal | last = Scheidt | first = Jürgen vom | year = 1973 | title = Sigmund Freud and cocaine | journal = Psyche | pages = pp. 385&ndash;430 }}</ref> Cocaine enhances dopaminergic neurotransmission increasing sexual interest and obsessive thinking. Chronic [[cocaine]] use can produce unusual thinking patterns due to the depletion of [[dopamine]] levels in the prefrontal [[cortex]].<br />
<br />
Finally, Freud's theories are often criticized for not being real science.<ref>Ludwig, 1973, pg. 93</ref> This objection was raised most famously by [[Karl Popper]], who claimed that all proper [[scientific theories]] must be potentially [[falsifiable]]. Popper argued that no experiment or observation could ever falsify Freud's theories of psychology (e.g. someone who denies having an Oedipal complex is interpreted as repressing it), and thus they could not be considered scientific.<ref>Karl Popper, “Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report,” in ''British Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium'', ed. C. A. Mace (1957), 155-91; reprinted in Karl Popper, ''Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge'' (1963; 2d ed., 1965), 33-65.</ref> Some proponents of science conclude that this standard invalidates Freudian theory as a means of interpreting and explaining human behavior.<br />
<br />
However, despite the aforementioned criticisms, scientific research has provided some support for Freudian theories. Indeed, recent research on the neuropsychology of dreaming indicates that Freud's dream theory (long thought to be discredited) is consistent with what is currently known about the dreaming brain. These findings have lead to the development of a new discipline, neuropsychoanalysis, which seeks to discover the neurological foundation of psychoanalytic theories.<br />
<br />
Freudian theory has given way to dozens of other theories during the 20th century. As a "for instance," notable Christian theorists such as Dr. James Dobson, Dr. Gary Smalley and Dr. Bill McDonald, who practice a more modern cognitive-behavioral approach, have experienced extremely good results over the course of several decades.<br />
<br />
==Patients==<br />
This is a partial list of patients whose case studies were published by Freud, with pseudonyms substituted for their names:<br />
<br />
[[Image:Freud_Sofa.JPG|thumb|240px|Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions]]<br />
<br />
* [[Anna O.]] = Bertha Pappenheim (1859&ndash;1936)<br />
* Cäcilie M. = Anna von Lieben<br />
* Dora = [[Ida Bauer]] (1882&ndash;1945)<br />
* Frau Emmy von N. = Fanny Moser<br />
* Fräulein Elizabeth von R.<br />
* Fräulein Katharina = Aurelia Kronich<br />
* Fräulein Lucy R.<br />
* [[Oedipus complex#Little Hans: a case study by Freud|Little Hans]] = [[Herbert Graf]] (1903&ndash;1973)<br />
* [[Rat Man]] = Ernst Lanzer (1878&ndash;1914)<br />
* [[Sergei Pankejeff|Wolf Man]] = Sergei Pankejeff (1887&ndash;1979)<br />
<br />
Other patients:<br />
<br />
* [[H.D.]] (1886&ndash;1961)<br />
* [[Emma Eckstein]] (1865&ndash;1924)<br />
* [[Gustav Mahler]] (1860&ndash;1911)<br />
* [[Princess Marie Bonaparte]]<br />
<br />
People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published but who were not patients:<br />
<br />
* [[Daniel Paul Schreber]] (1842&ndash;1911)<br />
* [[Woodrow Wilson]] (1856&ndash;1924) (co-authored with and primarily written by [[William Bullitt]])<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
In a passage Žižek does not seem to cite, Freud links philosophy and the joke:<blockquote>“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, said Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He therefore added what was missing: “But there is much, too, in philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth”. (''[[Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious]]'', ''SE'' VIII: 72)</blockquote>Philosophy – says the joke – misses its target, always falling short or carrying on too far. The one thing it does not do in its relations to heaven and earth is coincide with them. Freud also uses that phrase, without irony, as a piece of wisdom, in at least three other places. Two of them speak to his fascination with the possibility of telepathy: the 1921 paper on “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (''SE'' XVIII: 178), and the lecture on “Dreams and Occultism” from the 1933 ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'' (SE XXII: 31). He concludes his introductory remarks to [[Wolf Man|the Wolf Man case]] history with the admission that even though the case is a good fit for current psychoanalytic knowledge (as indeed he needs it to be, for this is the case he wants to be the watershed for the various heresies that had been arising within the psychoanalytic camp), many of the details of it are “so extraordinary and incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them”. After that, “there was nothing left for me but to remember the wise saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (''SE'' XVII: 34). In all three of those later invocations, it is not used as a way of claiming a superior knowledge for psychoanalysis, but of saying that psychoanalysis does not know either. Psychoanalysis meets philosophy on this excess, this point that is both too much to fit into the knowledge either provides, and the too-little explanation either can off er. Psychoanalysis does not so much abandon philosophy as take in philosophy as its symptom.<br />
<br />
Freud will usually say that he has no use for philosophy, which is in no “position to tell you anything serviceable of the relation between body and mind or to provide you with a key to an understanding of possible disturbances of the mental function” (''[[Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis]]'', ''SE'' XV: 20). What he is interested in is the particular. That is at the heart of his rejection of the popular “dream books” (''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'', ''SE'' IV: 97–9): instead of decoding the dream according to universal equivalences, the analyst needs to look for the “residues of the day”, those traces of the specific and complex contingencies of a life that make psychoanalysis into something like a science of biography. ''[[The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' some five years later (''SE'' VII: 123–245) will extend this focus on contingency to the drives themselves, whose aims and objects are similarly contingent and incalculable in advance. Drive, as Žižek will insist repeatedly (e.g. ''LA'': 32, 37; ''TS'': 293; ''PV'': 110; ''LN'': 495–6), is even the name for this perpetual discord. “It is here”, Žižek suggests, “that we should perhaps look for the basic premise of the Freudian theory of culture” (''LA'': 37).<br />
<br />
And it is here, again, that we meet philosophy on this point of excess. Th e remnants of the day and the discord of drive are for Žižek versions of the Hegelian refrain, “The Spirit is a bone”, that runs through his work (e.g. ''SO'': 207–12; ''TN'': 34–5, 51, 62, 85; ''TS'': 88–9, 92–3; ''OB'': 143; ''PV'': 5, 33, 77, 84; ''ET'': 26). Following this logic of the general in the particular and the genus in the species, we could say that (1) the subject is the contingent; (2) but this is nonsense, there is an absolute contradiction between the two terms; and (3) that very contradiction is precisely the subject (see, for example, ''ET'': 534).We could say something similar of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy: it is not that they are just versions of each other, at heart saying the same thing, but that in the deep and insistent contradictions between them each finds that extimacy of what is in it more than it. Freud is a thinker of the Real, and in that an anti-philosopher in the same sense as Lacan: “Not ‘I am not a philosopher’, but ‘I am a not-philosopher’, that is, I stand for the excessive core of philosophy itself, for what is in philosophy more than philosophy” (''PV'': 389).<br />
<br />
For Žižek, as for Badiou, “The basic motif of anti-philosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for [[Karl Marx|Marx]], Existence for [[Søren Kierkegaard|Kierkegaard]], Will for [[Schopenhauer]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], etc.), irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations” (''LN'': 841). Žižek finds in Freud that concern with the figure of rupture and event that runs through [[Walter Benjamin|Benjamin]] to [[Badiou]]. The Freudian subject is one whose time is out of joint with itself, and that exists only in this inconsistency (''LN'': 380), shot through with those chips of what Benjamin calls Messianic time (Benjamin 1973: 254– 5). We see this in the much-debated “''Wo es war, soll ich werden''” of the ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', and which Žižek along with Lacan translates as “Where it was, I shall come into being” (Freud, ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 80; Žižek uses this translation in the editorial description of books in Verso’s ''Wo Es War'' series, which he edits): one clause is in the past tense and the other in the future, as if that “it” and “I” were out of phase with each other. In the same lectures, Freud famously suggests that “One gets an impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically” (''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 134). But Freud’s is an incomplete anti-philosophy, for he cannot think the radical exteriority of trauma (ET: 295) and thus its purely political dimension. Žižek finds that dimension in Lacan’s claim to replace Freudian energetics with political economy (''PV'': 50), and in his insistence on the matheme as Real.<br />
<br />
One of Žižek’s most frequent sets of references to this inconsistency and excess of the subject and the symbolic comes directly or indirectly from Freud’s great cultural myth of the primordial father in the 1913 ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (''SE'' XIII: 1–161). Žižek spends far more time here than with that other great Freudian myth, [[Oedipus]], which he describes as the obverse of the [[primordial father]]: if Oedipus is about how one deals with the agent of the [[Law’s prohibition]], the killing of the primordial father is what gives rise to that Law (''TS'': 315). As the Hegelian logic of “the Spirit is a bone” suggests, though, it does this not by providing an impossible narrative of the transition between nature and culture, but by suggesting the way in which what is unrepresentable in such a narrative is the very (and impossible) conditions of possibility for both terms, and of the clarity of the Law that gives sha''p''e to both of them (''OB'': 74). It is not that the symbolic and its Law are inhabited by an untellable and unnarratable mystery, but that the trauma of the Real of the constitutive act inhabits the symbolic as the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]] (LA: 23).<br />
<br />
In the myth of the primordial father, we have the beginnings of Lacan’s various and ongoing formalizations of this impasse. The four discourses of Seminar XVII (''[[The Other Side of Psychoanalysis]]''), which he insists are cultural structures, provide the matrix of the possibilities of address. Their permutations circle the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]], inflecting the struggle of the sons with the father into the daughter’s struggle: the Master names the Event, but it is the hysteric who challenges the master (''TS'': 164). In the mathemes of sexuation, we have the primordial father as the exception to the Law founded by that very exceptionality, and the excessive and non-phallic ''[[jouissance]]'' it generates. The myth lends itself also in Žižek to a fertile theorization of politics, one that seeks to avoid the disavowals of ''[[Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego]]'' (''SE'' XVIII: 65–143), in which the political dimension is reduced to the figure of the “crowd” (TS: 191–2). Freud, Žižek argues, misses the sheer fanaticism that results from the undoing of the social bond (''LN'': 452), and the way in which the decline in Oedipal symbolic authority that characterizes late-capitalist liberal democracies is the obverse of the return of the primordial father as the agent of an obscene enjoyment (e.g. ME: 206; TS: 315; OB: 101; PD: 130), from the “totalitarian” leader to Hannibal Lecter. From his first formulation of the [[superego]], Freud is aware of its inherent and necessary contradiction, and the double bind in which it demands both that “You ''ought to be'' like this” and that “You ''may not be'' like this” (''[[The Ego and the Id]]'', ''SE'' XIX: 34). Žižek sharpens this into the single contradiction, “Enjoy!”; this superego imperative of late capitalist liberal democracy thus provides a radical re-interpretation of [[Louis Althusser|Althusser’s]] well-known theory of ideology as interpellation (e.g. ''TK'':108–9; ''TN'' 73–7; ''ME'': 59–62; ''TS'': 257–60).<br />
<br />
==Notes==<br />
{{reflist}}<br />
<br />
*Corey, Gerald (2000). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 6th ed. ISBN: 0534348238<br />
<br />
==Bibliography==<br />
<div class="references-small" style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;"><br />
===Major works by Freud===<br />
<br />
* ''[[Studies on Hysteria]]'' (with [[Josef Breuer]]) (''Studien über Hysterie'', 1895)<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'' (''Die Traumdeutung'', 1899 [1900])<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]'' (''Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens'', 1901)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' (''Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie'', 1905)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious]]'' (''Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten'', 1905)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (''Totem und Tabu'', 1913)<br />
<br />
* ''[[On Narcissism]]'' (''Zur Einführung des Narzißmus'', 1914)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'' (''Jenseits des Lustprinzips'', 1920)<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Ego and the Id]]'' (''Das Ich und das Es'', 1923)<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Future of an Illusion]]'' (''Die Zukunft einer Illusion'', 1927)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Civilization and Its Discontents]]'' (''Das Unbehagen in der Kultur'', 1930)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Moses and Monotheism]]'' (''Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion'', 1939)<br />
<br />
* ''[[An Outline of Psycho-Analysis]]'' (''Abriß der Psychoanalyse'', 1940)<br />
<br />
===Books about Freud and psychoanalysis===<br />
<br />
* [[Ernest Jones]] : "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.", Publisher: Basic Books, 1981, ISBN 0-465-04015-2<br />
* "The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939, R. Andrew Paskauskas (Editor), Riccardo Steiner (Introduction), Publisher: Belknap Press; Reprint edition 1995, ISBN 0-674-15424-X <br />
* "The Language of Psycho-Analysis" , [[Jean Laplanche]] et J.B. Pontalis, Editeur: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, ISBN 0-393-01105-4<br />
* "Sigmund Freud and [[Lou Andreas-Salome]]" : Letters" Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 1985), ISBN 0-393-30261-X<br />
* [[Lou Andreas-Salome]] : "The Freud Journal" , Publisher: Texas Bookman, 1996, ISBN 0-7043-0022-2<br />
* [[Sabina Spielrein]] : "Destruction as cause of becoming", 1993, {{OCLC|44450080}}<br />
* [[Marthe Robert]] : "The Psychoanalytic Revolution", Publisher: Avon Books; Discus ed edition, 1968, {{OCLC|2401215}} <br />
* [[Bruno Bettelheim]] : "Freud and Man's Soul: An Important Re-Interpretation of Freudian Theory" Publisher: Vintage; Vintage edition, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71036-3<br />
* [[André Green]]: "The Work of the Negative" by Andre Green, Andrew Weller (Translator), Publisher: Free Association Books, 1999, ISBN 1-85343-470-1<br />
* André Green: "On Private Madness", Publisher: International Universities Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8236-3853-7<br />
* André Green: "The Chains of Eros", Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 1-85575-960-8<br />
* André Green: "Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm For Clinical Thinking" Publisher: Free Association Books, 2005, ISBN 1-85343-773-5<br />
* John Farrell. ''Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion'' (NYU Press, 1996). A vigorous account of the relations between Freud's logic, rhetoric, and personality, as well as his relations with literary sources like Cervantes, Goethe, and Swift.<br />
* Rieff, Philip. ''Freud: The Mind of the Moralist'', 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). <br />
* Roazen, Paul. ''Freud and His Followers'' (Random House, 1975). A rich study of the development of psychoanalysis, based upon many personal interviews.<br />
*[[Elisabeth Young-Bruehl|Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth]] (1992). ''Freud on Women: A Reader''. Norton. ISBN 0-393-30870-7.<br />
*Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, ''Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory & Practice'' (London: Routledge, 1995)<br />
* Isbister, J. N. "Freud, An Introduction to his Life and Work" Publisher: Polity Press: Cambridge, Oxford. (1985)<br />
*[[Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson]], ''The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory'', Ballantine Books (November 2003), ISBN 0-345-45279-8<br />
<br />
===Conceptual critiques===<br />
<br />
* Robert Aziz, ''The Syndetic Paradigm:The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung'' (2007), a refereed publication of The [[State University of New York Press]]. ISBN-13:978-0-7914-6982-8.<br />
* [[Mortimer Adler|Adler, Mortimer J.]], ''What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology'' (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937). (A philosophical critique from an Aristotelian/Thomistic point of view.)<br />
<br />
* Cioffi, Frank. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998.<br />
<br />
* [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze, Gilles]] and [[Félix Guattari|Guattari, Félix]], ''Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia'', trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). (This first volume of the famous two-part work (also subtitled ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'') [[wiktionary:polemic|polemic]]ises Freud's argument that the Oedipal complex determines subjectivity. It is also, therefore, a staunch critique of the [[Lacan]]ian 'return to Freud.)<br />
<br />
* [[Henri Ellenberger]], ''The Discovery of the [[Unconscious mind|Unconscious]]: the History and Evolution of Dynamic [[Psychiatry]]'' (London: Penguin, 1970). (An extensive account and sensitive critique of Freudian metapsychology.) (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger)<br />
<br />
* Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.<br />
<br />
* [[Hans Eysenck|Eysenck, H. J.]] and Wilson, G. D. ''The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories'', Methuen, London (1973).<br />
<br />
* Eysenck, Hans, ''Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'' (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1986).<br />
<br />
*Hobson, J. Allan Hobson, ''Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN 0-19-280482-0. (Critique of Freud's dream theory in terms of current neuroscience)<br />
<br />
* Johnston, Thomas, ''Freud and Political Thought'' (New York: Citadel, 1965). (One of the more accessible accounts of the import of Freudianism for political theory.)<br />
<br />
* [[Sarah Kofman|Kofman, Sarah]], ''The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings'' (Ithaca, NY, & London: Cornell University Press, 1985).<br />
<br />
* Simonsen, Sean "I'm Okay, Freud is a Crackpot: Collected Essays on Denial" [http://www.standlikearock.com/forums "Stand Like A Rock"]<br />
<br />
* [[Herbert Marcuse|Marcuse, Herbert]], ''Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud'' (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974). (Mentioned above. For a good review, see Stirk, Peter M. R., ‘''Eros and Civilization'' revisited’, ''History of the Human Sciences'', 12 (1), 1999, pp. 73&ndash;90.)<br />
<br />
* Mitchell, Juliet. ''Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis'' Originally published in 1974; Basic Books reissue (2000) ISBN 0-465-04608-8<br />
<br />
* [[Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel|Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine]] & Grunberger, Béla. ''Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion.'' (London: Free Association Books, 1986)<br />
<br />
* Neu, Jerome (ed.), ''The Cambridge Companion to Freud'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). (A good conceptual overview.)<br />
<br />
* [[Paul Ricoeur|Ricoeur, Paul]], ''Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation'', trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972). <br />
<br />
*—, ''The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics'', ed. Don Ihde (London: Continuum, 2004). (A critical examination of the import of Freud for philosophy.)<br />
<br />
* Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers (New York: Random House, 1975).<br />
<br />
* [[Thomas Szasz|Szasz, Thomas]]. ''Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry'', Syracuse University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8156-0247-2. <br />
<br />
* Torrey, E. Fuller (1992). Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture. New York, NY : HarperCollins.<br />
* [[Valentin Voloshinov|Voloshinov, Valentin]]. ''Freudianism: A Marxist critique'', Academic Press (1976) ISBN 0-12-723250-8<br />
<br />
* Wollheim, Richard, ''Freud'', 2nd edn. (London: Fontana, 1991). (A good starting point.)<br />
<br />
===Biographies===<br />
<br />
The area of biography has been especially contentious in the [[historiography]] of psychoanalysis, for two primary reasons: first, following his death, significant portions of his personal papers were for several decades made available only at the permission of his biological and intellectual heirs (his daughter, Anna Freud, was extremely protective of her father's reputation); second, much of the data and theory of Freudian psychoanalysis hinges upon the personal testimony of Freud himself, and so to challenge Freud's legitimacy or honesty has been seen by many as an attack on the roots of his enduring work.<br />
<br />
The first biographies of Freud were written by Freud himself: his ''On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement'' (1914) and ''An Autobiographical Study'' (1924) provided much of the basis for discussions by later biographers, including "debunkers" (as they contain a number of prominent omissions and potential misrepresentations). A few of the major biographies on Freud to come out over the 20th century were:<br />
*Helen Walker Puner, ''Freud: His Life and His Mind'' (1947) &mdash; Puner's "facts" were often shaky at best but she was remarkably insightful with regard to Freud's unanalyzed relationship to his mother, Amalia. <br />
<br />
* [[Ernest Jones]], ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud'', 3 vols. (1953&ndash;1958) &mdash; the first "authorized" biography of Freud, made by one of his former students with the authorization and assistance of Anna Freud, with the hope of "dispelling the myths" from earlier biographies. Though this is the most comprehensive biography of Freud, Jones has been accused of writing more of a hagiography than a history of Freud. Among his questionable assertions, Jones diagnosed his own analyst, Ferenczi, as "psychotic." In the same breath, Jones also maligned Otto Rank, Ferenczi's close friend and Jones's most important rival for leadership of the movement in the 1920s. <br />
<br />
* [[Henri Ellenberger]], ''The Discovery of the Unconscious'' (1970) &mdash; was the first book to, in a compelling way, attempt to situate Freud within the context of his time and intellectual thought, arguing that he was the intellectual heir of [[Franz Mesmer]] and that the genesis of his theory owed a large amount to the political context of turn of the 19th century Vienna. (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger) <br />
<br />
* Frank Sulloway, ''Freud: Biologist of the Mind'' (1979) &mdash; Sulloway, one of the first professional/academic historians to write a biography of Freud, positioned Freud within the larger context of the [[history of science]], arguing specifically that Freud was, in fact, a biologist in disguise (a "crypto-biologist", in Sulloway's terms), and sought to actively hide this.<br />
<br />
* [[Peter Gay]], ''Freud: A Life for Our Time'' (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988) &mdash; Gay's impressively scholarly work was published in part as a response to the anti-Freudian literature and the "Freud Wars" of the 1980s (see below). Gay's book is probably the best pro-Freud biography available, though he is not completely uncritical of his hero. His "Bibliographical Essay" at the end of the volume provides astute evaluations of the voluminous literature on Freud up to the mid-1980s.<br />
<br />
* Breger, Louis. "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision." (New York: Wiley, 2000). Though written from a psychoanalytic point of view (the author is a former President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis), this is a "warts and all" life of Sigmund Freud. It corrects, in the light of historical research of recent decades, many (though not quite all) of several disputed traditional historical accounts of events uncritically recycled by Peter Gay. <br />
<br />
The creation of Freud biographies has itself even been written about at some length&mdash;see, for example, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "A History of Freud Biographies," in ''Discovering the History of Psychiatry'', edited by Mark S. Micale and [[Roy Porter]] (Oxford University Press, 1994).<br />
<br />
===Biographical critiques===<br />
<br />
* Bakan, David. ''Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition'', D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958; New York, Schocken Books, 1965; Dover Publications, 2004. ISBN 0-486-43767-1<br />
<br />
* Crews, F. C. ''Unauthorized Freud : doubters confront a legend'', New York, Viking 1998. ISBN 0-670-87221-0<br />
<br />
* Dolnick, Edward. ''Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis'' ISBN 0-684-82497-3<br />
<br />
* Dufresne, T. ''Killing Freud'', Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.<br />
<br />
* Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.<br />
<br />
* Eysenck, H. J. ''The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'', Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D. C., (1990) <br />
<br />
* Jurjevich, R. M. ''The Hoax of Freudism: A study of Brainwashing the American Professionals and Laymen'' Dorrance (1974) ISBN 0-8059-1856-6<br />
<br />
* LaPiere, R. T. ''The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of Western Character'' Greenwood Press (1974) ISBN 0-8371-7543-7<br />
<br />
* [[Jonathan Lear|Lear, Jonathan]]. ''Freud'' Routledge (2005) ISBN 0-415-31451-8<br />
<br />
* [[Emil_Ludwig|Ludwig, Emil]], ''Doctor Freud'', Manor Books, New York, 1973 <br />
<br />
* [[Kevin B. MacDonald|MacDonald, Kevin B]]. ''The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements'' Authorhouse (2002) ISBN 0-7596-7222-9<br />
<br />
* Macmillan, Malcolm. ''Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc'' MIT Press, 1996 ISBN 0-262-63171-7 [originally published by New Holland, 1991]<br />
<br />
* Scharnberg, Max. ''The non-authentic nature of Freud's observations'', Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993 ISBN 91-554-3122-4<br />
<br />
* Stannard, D. E. ''Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory'' Oxford University Press, Oxford (1980) ISBN 0-19-503044-3<br />
<br />
* Thornton, E. M. ''Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy'', Blond & Briggs, London (1983) ISBN 0-85634-139-8<br />
<br />
* Webster, Richard. ''Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis'' BasicBooks, 1995. ISBN 0-465-09579-8<br />
<br />
* Sonia Montero Padilla contributed to this page.<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==See also==<br />
===Topics===<br />
{{col-begin}}<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[American Psychoanalytic Association]]<br />
* [[Freudian slip]]<br />
* [[Freudo-Marxism]]<br />
* [[Neo-Freudian]]<br />
* [[Penis envy]]<br />
* [[Psychic energy]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalysis]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[History of hypnosis#Psychoanalysis and Hypnotherapy|Psychoanalysis and Hypnotherapy]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalytic literary criticism]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalytic theory]]<br />
* [[Psychodynamics]]<br />
* [[Psychological projection]]<br />
* [[Psychology of religion]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Psychosexual development]]<br />
** [[Oral stage]]<br />
** [[Anal stage]]<br />
** [[Phallic stage]]<br />
** [[Genital stage]]<br />
* [[Psychotherapy]]<br />
* [[Shame]]<br />
* [[Unconscious mind]]<br />
{{col-end}}<br />
<br />
===People===<br />
{{col-begin}}<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Alfred Adler|Adler, Alfred]]<br />
* [[Josef Breuer|Breuer, Josef]]<br />
* [[Edward L. Bernays|Edward Bernays]]<br />
* [[Jean-Martin Charcot|Charcot, Jean-Martin]]<br />
* [[Erik Erikson|Erikson, Erik]]<br />
* [[Wilhelm Fliess|Fliess, Wilhelm]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Viktor Frankl]]<br />
* [[Anna Freud|Freud, Anna]]<br />
* [[Georg Groddeck|Groddeck, Georg]]<br />
* [[Boris Sidis]]<br />
* [[Wilfred Bion]]<br />
* [[Karen Horney|Horney, Karen]]<br />
* [[Ernest Jones|Jones, Ernest]]<br />
* [[Carl Jung|Jung, Carl]]<br />
* [[Melanie Klein|Klein, Melanie]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]<br />
* [[Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson|Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff]]<br />
* [[Otto Rank|Rank, Otto]]<br />
* [[Wilhelm Reich|Reich, Wilhelm]]<br />
* [[Herbert Silberer|Silberer, Herbert]]<br />
* [[Charles Darwin|Darwin, Charles]]<br />
{{col-end}}<br />
<br />
==External links==<br />
{{commons|Sigmund Freud}}<br />
{{wikiquote}}<br />
{{wikisource author}}<br />
* [http://www.pribor.cz/ PŘÍBOR-Freud birth place]<br />
* [http://www.freud.org.uk/ Freud Museum in London]<br />
* [http://www.freudfile.org/ Sigmund Freud Life and Work]<br />
* [http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/phil/psychology/ScientificMethodInTheInterpretationOfDreams/Chap1.html Scientific Method in the Interpretation of Dreams]<br />
* [http://www.ipa.org.uk/ International Psychoanalytical Association, founded by Freud in 1910] <br />
* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4445608-99939,00.html Scientist or storyteller?]<br />
* [http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html International Network of Freud Critics]<br />
* [http://www.iceion.com/philo/philo.php?page=freud Freud's Philosophy]<br />
* [http://www.freud-museum.at/ Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, Vienna]<br />
* [https://docushop.at/en/detail.asp?p_id=301 Sigmund Freud Movie about Berggasse 19]<br />
* [http://www.positivehealth.com/permit/Articles/Regular/litt55.htm One Hundred Years of Sigmund Freud]<br />
* [http://atheisme.free.fr/Biographies/Freud_e.htm Sigmund Freud Biography and Quotations]<br />
* [http://www.britannica.com/original?content_id=1309 Sigmund Freud's article on Psychoanalysis from the 1926 (Thirteenth) edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica]<br />
* [http://www.sfi-frankfurt.de/ Sigmund-Freud-Institut]<br />
* [http://www.freudarchives.org/ Freud Archives at Library of Congress]<br />
* [http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/freud_e.html ''Freud's Unwritten Case: The Patient "E."'' by Douglas A. Davis]<br />
*[http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com/Article/The-Darwin-of-the-Mind/139 The Darwin of the Mind]<br />
<br />
* {{gutenberg author| id=Sigmund+Freud | name=Sigmund Freud}}<br />
* [http://www.robertaziz.com Website of leading Freud-Jungian scholar/ author, Dr. Robert Aziz]<br />
* {{es icon}} [http://www.enfocarte.com/7.31/filosofia1.html Nietzsche y Freud; la ficcion del sujeto y las seducciones de la gramatica] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD<br />
* {{es icon}} [http://www.box.net/index.php?rm=box_download_shared_file&file_id=f_44672761&shared_name=9ykgpnv487 La influencia de Nietzsche sobre Freud] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD<br />
*[http://essays.quotidiana.org/freud/ Essays by Freud at Quotidiana.org]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Sigmund Freud]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalytic theory]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian psychiatrists]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian psychologists]]<br />
[[Category:Developmental psychologists]]<br />
[[Category:Freud family]]<br />
[[Category:Psychodynamics]]<br />
[[Category:History of mental health]]<br />
[[Category:History of neuroscience]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy of sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian philosophers]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysts]]<br />
[[Category:20th century philosophers]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian atheists]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian emigrants]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian Jews]]<br />
[[Category:Czech expatriates]]<br />
[[Category:Jewish scientists]]<br />
[[Category:People from Vienna]]<br />
[[Category:Doctors who committed suicide]]<br />
[[Category:Drug-related suicides]]<br />
[[Category:Deaths by euthanasia]]<br />
[[Category:Psychology writers]]<br />
[[Category:1856 births]]<br />
[[Category:1939 deaths]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]<br />
<br />
=====Where=====<br />
[[Freud]] was born in Moravia in 1856 but his family moved to Vienna in 1860.<br />
<br />
The city remained his home until 1938 when the ''Anschluss'', the incorporation of Austria into the Nazi Reich, obliged him to make a reluctant departure for London.<br />
<br />
=====Student=====<br />
[[Freud]] graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1881, and his early research and publications dealt with anatomy and physiology.<br />
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<br />
<br />
=====References=====<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:People|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Sigmund Freud|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Freudian psychology|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Looking Awry|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
<br />
{{Encore}}<br />
:* [[Freud, S.]], 3''n'', 11''n'', 15, 37n, 50, 53, 55, 61-62, 66, 77, 80, 89, 91, 96, 100, 105, 108-9, 112, 115, 120, 121, 126 <br />
:: [[Lacan]] and, 41, 47, 97 <br />
:: on [[perversion]], 86-87 <br />
:: on [[reality]], 55-56 <br />
:: [[women]] and, 72, 74-75, 80, 86-87, 99, 127</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Sigmund_Freud&diff=43775Sigmund Freud2019-04-15T23:06:40Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Sigmund Freud''', born '''Sigismund Schlomo Freud''' (May 6 1856 &ndash; September 23 1939), was a Jewish-Austrian neurologist and [[psychiatrist]] who co-founded the [[psychoanalysis|psychoanalytic school]] of [[psychology]]. Freud is best known for his theories of the [[unconscious mind]], especially involving the mechanism of [[Psychological repression|repression]]; his redefinition of [[sexual desire]] as mobile and directed towards a wide variety of objects; and his therapeutic techniques, especially his understanding of [[transference]] in the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of [[dream]]s as sources of insight into unconscious desires.<br />
<br />
He is commonly referred to as "the father of psychoanalysis" and his work has been highly influential — popularizing such notions as the unconscious, [[defence mechanism|defense mechanism]]s, [[Freudian slips]] and [[dream symbolism]] — while also making a long-lasting impact on fields as diverse as [[literature]] ([[Kafka]]), [[film]], [[Marxism|Marxist]] and [[feminist]] theories, [[literary criticism]], [[philosophy]], and [[psychology]]. However, his theories remain controversial and widely disputed. <br />
<br />
==Biography==<br />
===Early life===<br />
Sigmund Freud was born to Jewish parents in Příbor (''Freiberg'' in German), Moravia (then Austrian Empire, now Czech Republic), on 6 May 1856. His father Jacob was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother Amalia was 21. Owing to his intellect, which was obvious from an early stage of his childhood, his parents favored him over his siblings, and even though they were poor they offered everything to give him a proper education. As a result, Freud did extremely well during his first 8 years of school, but at the age of 17, he had to move to the University in Vienna because of the strong anti-Semitism in Austria at the time, at which time his grades plummeted.<br />
<br />
<br />
===Medical school===<br />
In 1874, the concept of "[[psychodynamics]]" was seeded with the publication of ''Lectures on Physiology'' by German physiologist [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Ernst von Brücke]] who, in coordination with physicist [[Hermann von Helmholtz]], one of the formulators of the [[first law of thermodynamics]] ([[conservation of energy]]), supposed that all living organisms are energy-systems also governed by this principle. During this year, at the [[University of Vienna]], Brucke was also coincidentally the supervisor for first-year medical student Sigmund Freud who naturally adopted this new “dynamic” physiology. In his ''Lectures on Physiology'', Brücke set forth the radical view that the living organism is a [[dynamic system]] to which the laws of [[chemistry]] and [[physics]] apply.<ref name="Hall">{{cite book | last = Hall | first = Calvin, S.| title = A Primer in Freudian Psychology | publisher = Meridian Book | year = 1954 | id = ISBN 0452011833}}</ref> This was the starting point for Freud's dynamic psychology of the mind and its relation to the [[unconscious]].<ref name="Hall" /><ref>[http://www.humanthermodynamics.com/Freud.html Freud's Psycho Dynamic Theory and Thermodynamics] [1873-1923] - Institute of Human Thermodynamics</ref> The origins of Freud’s basic model, based on the fundmentals of chemistry and physics, according to [[John Bowlby]], stems from [[Ernst Wilhelm von Brücke|Brücke]], [[Meynert]], [[Josef Breuer|Breuer]], [[Helmholtz]], and [[Herbart]].<ref name="Bowlby">{{cite book | last = Bowlby | first = John | title = Attachment and Loss: Vol I, 2nd Ed. | publisher = Basic Books | pages = 13-23| year = 1999 | id = ISBN 0-465-00543-8}}</ref><br />
<br />
===Later life===<br />
Freud married in 1886, after the opening of a private clinic, specializing in nerve and brain damage. After using [[hypnosis]] on his neurotic patients for a long period, he abandoned this form of treatment, in favor of a better treatment, where the patient talked through his or her problem.<br />
<br />
Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychotherapist, told a colleague about his first visit with Sigmund Freud in the year 1907. Jung had much that he wanted to talk about with Freud, and he spoke with intense animation for three whole hours. Finally Freud interrupted him and, to Jung's astonishment, proceeded to group the contents of Jung's monologue into several precise categories that enabled them to spend their remaining hours together in a more profitable give-and-take. <ref>Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, edited and abridged by Lionell Trilling and Steven Marcus (New York: Basic Books, 1961), p. 253.</ref><br />
<br />
Freud held the opinion (based on personal experience and observation) that sexual activity was incompatible with the accomplishing of any great work. Since he felt that the great work of creating and establishing psychotherapy was his destiny, he told his wife that they could no longer engage in sexual relations. Indeed from about the age of forty until his death Freud was absolutely celibate “in order to sublimate the libido for creative purposes,” according to his biographer [[Ernest Jones]].<br />
<br />
Nonetheless, there has been persistent gossip, which has always been staunchly denied by Freud loyalists, about the possibility that around this time a romantic liaison had blossomed between Freud, and his sister-in-law, who had moved in with the Freuds in 1896. This rumour of an illicit relationship has been most notably propelled forward by [[Carl Jung|C. G. Jung]], Freud's disciple and later his archrival, who had claimed that Miss Bernays had confessed the affair to him. (This claim was dismissed by Freudians as malice on Jung's part.) It has been suggested that the affair resulted in a pregnancy and subsequently an abortion for Miss Bernays.<br />
<br />
A hotel log dated [[August 13]], [[1898]] seems to support the allegation of an affair.<ref>{{cite news| first=Ralph|last= Blumenthal| title=Hotel log hints at desire that Freud didn't repress| publisher=International Herald Tribune| date=24 December 2006| url=http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/24/europe/web.1224freud.php}}</ref><br />
<br />
In his 40s, Freud "had numerous psychosomatic disorders as well as exaggerated fears of dying and other phobias" (Corey 2001, p. 67). During this time Freud was involved in the task of exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize the hostility he felt towards his father (Jacob Freud), and "he also recalled his childhood sexual feelings for his mother (Amalia Freud), who was attractive, warm, and protective" (Corey 2001, p. 67). Corey (2001) considers this time of emotional difficulty to be the most creative time in Freud's life.<br />
<br />
After the publication of Freud's books in 1900 and 1901, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed in the following period. Freud often chose to disregard the criticisms of those who were skeptical of his theories, however, and even gained a few direct opponents as a result,{{Fact|date=March 2007}} the most famous being [[Carl Jung]], who was originally in support of Freud's ideas. <br />
<br />
In 1930 Freud received the [[Goethe Prize]] in appreciation of his contribution to psychology and to German literary culture. Three years later the [[Nazis]] took control of [[Germany]] and Freud's books featured prominently amongst those burned by the Nazis. In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the [[Anschluss]]. This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the [[Gestapo]]. Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom". He and his family left Vienna in June 1938 and traveled to [[London]]. <br />
<br />
A heavy cigar smoker, Freud endured more than 30 operations during his life due to [[mouth cancer]]. In September 1939 he prevailed on his doctor and friend [[Max Schur]] to assist him in suicide. After reading [[Balzac]]'s ''[[La Peau de chagrin]]'' in a single sitting he said, "My dear Schur, you certainly remember our first talk. You promised me then not to forsake me when my time comes. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense any more." Schur administered three doses of morphine over many hours that resulted in Freud's death on September 23, 1939.<ref>{{cite book| last=Gay| first= Peter| year=1988| title=Freud: A Life for Our Time| location=New York| publisher= W. W. Norton & Company |authorlink=Peter Gay|}}</ref> <br />
Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at [[Golders Green Crematorium]] during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author [[Stefan Zweig]]. His ashes were later placed in the crematorium's [[columbarium]]. They rest in an ancient Greek urn which Freud had received as a present from [[Marie Bonaparte]] and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After Martha Freud's death in [[1951]], her ashes were also placed in that urn. Golders Green Crematorium has since also become the final resting place for [[Anna Freud]] and her lifelong friend [[Dorothy Burlingham]], as well as for several other members of the Freud family.<br />
<br />
==Innovations==<br />
Freud has been influential in two related but distinct ways. He simultaneously developed a theory of how the human [[mind]] is organized and operates internally, and how human [[behavior]] both conditions and results from this particular theoretical understanding. This lead him to favor certain clinical techniques for attempting to help cure [[Mental illness|psychopathology]].<br />
<br />
===Early work===<br />
[[Image:Tavistock and Freud statue.JPG|thumb|300px|right|Sigmund Freud memorial in [[Hampstead]], north London. Sigmund and [[Anna Freud|Anna]] Freud lived at 20 Maresfield Gardens, directly opposite the statue; the house is now a museum dedicated to his life and work. The building behind the statue is the [[Tavistock Clinic]], a major psychiatric institution.]]Due to [[Neurology]] and [[Psychiatry]] not being recognized as distinct medical fields at the time of Sigmund Freud's training, the medical degree he obtained after studying for six years at the [[University of Vienna]] board certified him in both Neurology and Psychiatry, although he is far more well-known for his work in the latter. As far as neurology went, Freud was an early researcher on the topic of [[neurophysiology]], specifically [[cerebral palsy]], which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed far before other researchers in his day began to notice and study it. He also suggested that [[William Little (English surgeon)|William Little]], the man who first identified [[cerebral palsy]], was wrong about lack of [[oxygen]] during the birth process being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom of the problem. It was not until the 1980s that Freud's speculations were confirmed by more modern research.{{Fact|date=February 2007}}<br />
<br />
Freud was an early user and proponent of [[cocaine]] as a stimulant as well as [[analgesic]]. He wrote several articles on the [[antidepressant]] qualities of the drug and he was influenced by his friend and confidant [[Wilhelm Fliess]], who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the "nasal reflex neurosis." Fliess operated on Freud and a number of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, including [[Emma Eckstein]], whose surgery proved disastrous. <br />
<br />
Freud felt that cocaine would work as a cure-all for many disorders and wrote a well-received paper, "On Coca," explaining its virtues. He prescribed it to his friend [[Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow]] to help him overcome a morphine [[addiction]] he had acquired while treating a disease of the nervous system. Freud also recommended it to many of his close family and friends. He narrowly missed out on obtaining [[scientific priority]] for discovering cocaine's [[anesthesia|anesthetic]] properties (of which Freud was aware but on which he had not written extensively), after [[Karl Koller]], a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, presented a report to a medical society in 1884 outlining the ways in which cocaine could be used for delicate [[Ophthalmic|eye]] surgery. Freud was bruised by this, especially because this would turn out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world. Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished because of this early ambition. Furthermore, Freud's friend Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis" as a result of Freud's prescriptions and died a few years later. Freud felt great regret over these events, which later biographers have dubbed "The Cocaine Incident." <br />
<br />
Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or [[psychoanalysis]], was to bring to [[consciousness]] repressed thoughts and feelings. According to some of his successors, including his daughter Anna Freud, the goal of therapy is to allow the patient to develop a stronger [[Ego, super-ego, and id|ego]]; according to others, notably [[Jacques Lacan]], the goal of therapy is to lead the [[analysand]] to a full acknowledgment of his or her inability to satisfy the most basic desires. <br />
<br />
Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging the patient to talk in [[free association]] and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is a relative lack of direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, [[transference]], the patient can reenact and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts with (or about) parents.<br />
<br />
The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to [[Josef Breuer|Joseph Breuer]]. Freud actually credits Breuer with the discovery of the psychoanalytical method. One case started this phenomenon that would shape the field of psychology for decades to come, the case of [[Anna O.]] In 1880 a young girl came to Breuer with symptoms of what was then called [[female hysteria]]. Anna O. was a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman. She presented with symptoms such as paralysis of the limbs, [[Dissociative identity disorder|split personality]] and amnesia; today these symptoms are known as [[conversion disorder]]. After many doctors had given up and accused Anna O. of faking her symptoms, Breuer decided to treat her sympathetically, which he did with all of his patients. He started to hear her mumble words during what he called states of absence. Eventually Breuer started to recognize some of the words and wrote them down. He then hypnotized her and repeated the words to her; Breuer found out that the words were associated with her father's illness and death. <br />
<br />
In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique". The traditional story, based on Freud's later accounts of this period, is that as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but after having heard a patient tell the story about Freud's personal friend being the victimizer, Freud concluded that his patients were fantasizing the abuse scenes. <br />
<br />
In 1896 Freud posited that the symptoms of 'hysteria' and obsessional neurosis derived from ''unconscious'' memories of sexual abuse in infancy, and claimed that he had uncovered such incidents for every single one of his current patients (one third of whom were men). However a close reading of his papers and letters from this period indicates that these patients did not report early childhood sexual abuse as he later claimed: rather, he arrived at his findings by analytically inferring the supposed incidents, using a procedure that was heavily dependent on the symbolic interpretation of somatic symptoms.<br />
<br />
===The unconscious===<br />
<br />
Perhaps the most significant contribution Freud made to Western thought was his argument for the existence of an [[unconscious mind]]. During the 19th century, the dominant trend in [[western world|Western]] thought was [[positivism]], which subscribed to the belief that people could ascertain real knowledge concerning themselves and their environment and judiciously exercise control over both. Freud, however, suggested that such declarations of free will are in fact delusions; that we are not entirely aware of what we think and often act for reasons that have little to do with our conscious thoughts.<br />
<br />
The concept of the unconscious as proposed by Freud was considered by some to be groundbreaking in that he proposed that awareness existed in layers and that some thoughts occurred "below the surface." Nevertheless, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer, among others, pointed out, "contrary to what most people believe, the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, [[William James]], in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'".<ref>Meyer (2005, 217).</ref> [[Boris Sidis]], a Jewish Russian who escaped to the USA in 1887, and studied under [[William James]], wrote ''The Psychology of Suggestion: A Research into the Subconscious Nature of Man and Society'' in 1898, followed by ten or more works over the next twenty five years on similar topics to the works of Freud.<br />
<br />
Moreover, the historian of psychology Mark Altschule wrote: "It is difficult - or perhaps impossible - to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance."<ref>{{cite book| last=Altschule| first= M| year=1977| title=Origins of Concepts in Human Behavior| location=New York| publisher= Wiley| pages= 199}}, cited in [http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=57 Allen Esterson, Freud returns?]</ref> Freud's advance was not, then, to uncover the unconscious but to devise a method for systematically studying it.<br />
<br />
[[Dream]]s, which he called the "royal road to the unconscious," provided the best access to our unconscious life and the best illustration of its "logic," which was different from the logic of conscious thought. Freud developed his first [[topology]] of the psyche in ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'' (1899) in which he proposed the argument that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The [[preconscious]] was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought&mdash;that which we could access with a little effort. Thus for Freud, the ideals of [[the Enlightenment]], positivism and [[rationalism]], could be achieved through understanding, transforming, and mastering the unconscious, rather than through denying or repressing it.<br />
<br />
Crucial to the operation of the unconscious is "[[Psychological repression|repression]]." According to Freud, people often experience thoughts and feelings that are so painful that they cannot bear them. Such thoughts and feelings&mdash;and associated memories&mdash;could not, Freud argued, be banished from the mind, but could be banished from consciousness. Thus they come to constitute the unconscious. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that individual patients repress different things. Moreover, Freud observed that the process of repression is itself a non-conscious act (in other words, it did not occur through people willing away certain thoughts or feelings). Freud supposed that what people repressed was in part determined by their unconscious. In other words, the unconscious was for Freud both a cause and effect of repression.<br />
<br />
Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the [[descriptive unconscious]], the [[dynamic unconscious]], and the [[system unconscious]]. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific [[social construct|construct]], referred to mental processes and contents which are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement. <br />
<br />
Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the [[Ego, super-ego, and id]] (discussed below). Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.<br />
<br />
===Psychosexual development===<br />
{{main|Psychosexual development}}<br />
Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient [[mythology]] and contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the [[Oedipus complex]] after the famous [[Greek tragedy]] ''[[Oedipus the King|Oedipus Rex]]'' by [[Sophocles]]. “I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood,” Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification (cf. ''[[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]''). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire [[incest]] and must repress that desire. The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to [[cultural anthropology|anthropological]] studies of [[totemism]] and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal [[Oedipal conflict]].<br />
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Freud originally posited childhood [[sexual abuse]] as a general explanation for the origin of neuroses, but he abandoned this so-called "seduction theory" as insufficiently explanatory, noting that he had found many cases in which apparent memories of childhood sexual abuse were based more on imagination than on real events. During the late 1890s Freud, who never abandoned his belief in the sexual etiology of neuroses, began to emphasize fantasies built around the Oedipus complex as the primary cause of hysteria and other neurotic symptoms. Despite this change in his explanatory model, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had been sexually abused by their fathers, and was quite explicit about discussing several patients whom he knew to have been abused.<ref>{{cite book |title=Freud: A Life for Our Time| pages=p.95|}}</ref><br />
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Freud also believed that the [[libido]] developed in individuals by changing its object, a process designed by the concept of ''[[sublimation (psychology)|sublimation]]''. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development&mdash;first in the [[oral stage]] (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the [[anal stage]] (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the [[phallic stage]]. Freud argued that children then passed through a stage in which they fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the [[Oedipus Complex]]) but that the child eventually overcame and repressed this desire because of its taboo nature. (The lesser known [[Electra complex]] refers to such a fixation on the father.) The repressive or dormant [[The_Latency_Phase_%286-12_years_of_age%29|latency stage]] of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature [[genital stage]] of psychosexual development. <br />
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Freud's way of interpretation has been called phallocentric by many contemporary thinkers. This is because, for Freud, the unconscious always desires the phallus (penis). Males are afraid of castration - losing their phallus or masculinity to another male. Females always desire to have a phallus - an unfulfillable desire. Thus boys resent their fathers (fear of castration) and girls desire theirs. For Freud, desire is always defined in the negative term of lack - you always desire what you don't have or what you are not, and it is very unlikely that you will fulfill this desire. Thus his psychoanalysis treatment is meant to teach the patient to cope with his or her unsatisfiable desires.<br />
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===Ego, super-ego, and id===<br />
{{main|Ego, super-ego, and id}}<br />
In his later work, Freud proposed that the psyche could be divided into three parts: [[Ego, super-ego, and id]]. <br />
Freud discussed this structural model of the mind in the 1920 essay ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'', and fully elaborated it in ''[[The Ego and The Id]]'' (1923), where he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (conscious, unconscious, preconscious).<br />
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Freud acknowledges that his use of the term Id (or the It) derives from the writings of [[Georg Grodeck]]. It is interesting to note that the term Id appears in the earliest writing of [[Boris Sidis]], attributed to [[William James]], as early as 1898.<br />
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===Defense mechanisms===<br />
According to Kirrilee Arb, the [[defense mechanisms]] are the methods by which the ego can deal with conflicts between the super-ego and the id. The use of defense mechanisms may attenuate the conflict between the id and super-ego, but their overuse or reuse rather than confrontation can lead to either anxiety or [[guilt]] which may result in psychological disorders such as depression. His daughter [[Anna Freud]] had done the most significant work on this field, yet she credited Sigmund with defense mechanisms as he began the work. The defense mechanisms include [[denial]], [[reaction formation]], [[Displacement (psychology)|displacement]], [[psychological repression|repression]]/[[suppression]] (the proper term), [[psychological projection|projection]], [[intellectualization]], [[rationalization (psychology)|rationalization]], compensation, [[sublimation (psychology)|sublimation]] and [[regressive emotionality]].<br />
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*''Denial'' occurs when someone fends off awareness of an unpleasant truth or of a reality that is a threat to the ego. For example, a student may have received a bad grade on a report card but tells himself that grades don't matter. (Some early writers argued for a striking parallel between Freudian denial and [[Nietzsche]]'s ideas of ''[[ressentiment]]'' and the ''revaluation of values'' that he attributed to "herd" or "slave" morality.)<br />
*''Reaction formation'' takes place when a person takes the opposite approach consciously compared to what that person wants unconsciously. For example, someone may engage in violence against another race because, that person claims, the members of the race are inferior, when unconsciously it is that very person who feels inferior.<br />
*''Displacement'' takes place when someone redirects emotion from a "dangerous" object to a "safe" one, such as punching a pillow when one is angry at a friend.<br />
*''[[Psychological repression|Repression]]'' occurs when an experience is so painful (such as war trauma) that it is unconsciously forced from consciousness, while ''suppression'' is a conscious effort to do the same.<br />
*''[[Psychological projection]]'' occurs when a person "projects" his or her own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings — basically parts of oneself — onto someone or something else. Since the person is experiencing particular desires, feelings, thoughts, or anxieties, s/he is more prone to [[attribution theory|attribute]] those same characteristics to the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of others.<br />
*''Intellectualization'' involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event, by focusing on rational and factual components of the situation. <br />
*''Rationalization'' involves constructing a logical justification for a decision that was originally arrived at through a different mental process. For example, Jim may drink red wine because he is an alcoholic, but he tells himself he drinks it because it has some health benefits, in order to avoid facing his alcoholism.<br />
*''Compensation'' occurs when someone takes up one behaviour because one cannot accomplish another behaviour. For example, the second born child may clown around to get attention since the older child is already an accomplished scholar.<br />
*''Sublimation'' is the channeling of impulses to socially accepted behaviours. For instance, an aggressive or homicidal person may join the military as a cover for their violent behavior.<br />
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===The life and death instincts===<!-- This section is linked from [[Erich Fromm]] --><br />
Freud believed that humans were driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive ([[Eros (Freud)|Eros]]) (incorporating the sex drive) and the death drive ([[Thanatos]]). Freud's description of Eros and Libido included all creative, life-producing drives. The [[death drive]] (or death instinct) represented an urge inherent in all living things to return to a state of calm, or, ultimately, of non-existence. The presence of the Death Drive was only recognized in his later years, and the contrast between the two represents a revolution in his manner of thinking. The death instinct is also referred to as the [[Nirvana]] Principle.<br />
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It should be added that these ideas owe a great deal to both Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy, expounded in ''The World as Will and Representation'', describes a renunciation of the will to live that corresponds on many levels with Freud's Death Drive. The life drive clearly owes much to Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian in ''The Birth of Tragedy''. Freud was an avid reader of both philosophers and acknowledged their influence.<br />
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===Social psychology===<br />
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[[Image:PICT4139.JPG|thumb|250px|Freud boarding a Lufthansa flight in the 1930s. (Memorial to the German Resistance, Berlin)]]<br />
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Freud gave explanations of the genesis of religion in his writings, included in a reflection on [[crowd psychology]]. In ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (1913), he proposed that humans originally banded together in “primal hordes”, consisting of a male, a number of females and the offspring of this [[polygamous]] arrangement. According to Freud’s psychoanalytical theory, a male child early in life has sexual desires for his mother – the [[Oedipus Complex]] – which he held to be [[Universality (philosophy)|universal]]. [[Ethnology|Ethnologists]] would later criticize this point, leading to ethno-psychoanalytic studies. According to Freud, the father is protective, so his sons love him, but they are also jealous of their father for his relationship with their mothers. Finding that individually they cannot defeat the father-leader, they band together, kill and eat him in a ritual meal, thereby ingesting the substance of the father’s hated power – but their subsequent guilt leads the sons to elevate their father's memory and to worship him. The [[super-ego]] then takes the place of the father as the source of internalized authority. A ban was then put upon [[incest]] and upon [[marriage]] within the clan, and symbolic animal [[sacrifice]] was substituted for the ritual killing of a human being.<br />
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In ''[[Moses and Monotheism]]'' (1939) Freud reconstructed biblical history in accord with his general theory, but many biblical scholars and historians would not accept his account since it defied commonly accepted views on the [[Jewish history|history of Judaism]] and of dynastic Egypt. However, this book remains interesting as an interpretation of [[leadership]] based on [[charisma]] and [[mass psychology]], using the [[Prophet]]ic figure of Moses. His ideas about [[religion]] were also developed in ''[[The Future of an Illusion]]'' (1927). When Freud spoke of religion as an [[illusion]], he maintained that it is a [[fantastic]] structure from which a man must be set free if he is to grow to [[maturity]]; and in his treatment of the unconscious he moved toward [[atheism]]. In this sense, Freud approached the [[Marxism|Marxist theory]] of [[Marx's theory of alienation|alienation]]. Freud isolated two main principles: [[Death instinct|Thanatos]] is the drive towards the dissolution of all life, whereas [[Eros (love)|Eros]] is to strive towards stopping that drive. When one goal is reached, the other becomes out-of-reach, and vice versa. <br />
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In ''"[[Group Psychology]] and Ego Analysis"'' (''Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analysis'', 1920), Freud explored crowd psychology, continuing [[Gustave Le Bon]]'s early work. When the individual joins a crowd, he ceases repressing his instincts, and thus relapses into [[primitive culture]], according to Freud's analysis. However, crowds must be distinguished into natural and organized crowds, following [[William McDougall (psychologist)|William McDougall]]'s distinction. Thus, if intellectual skills (the capacity to [[doubt]] and to distance oneself) are systematically reduced when the individual joins a mass, he may eventually be "morally enlightened". Prefiguring ''Moses and Monotheism'' and ''The Future of an Illusion'', he states that the love relationship between the leader and the masses, in the Church or in the Army, are only an "idealist transformation of the conditions existing in the primitive horde". Freud then compares the leader's relationship with the crowd to a relation of [[hypnosis]], a force to which he relates [[Mana]]. Pessimistic about humanity's chances of [[liberty]], Freud writes that "the leader of the crowd always incarnates the dreaded primitive father, the crowd always wants to be dominated by an unlimited power, it is grasping at the highest degree for [[authority]] or, to use [[Gustave Le Bon|Le Bon]]'s expression, it is hungry for subservience".<br />
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According to Freud, [[self-identification]] to a common figure, the leader, explained the phenomenon of masses' obedience. Each individual connected themselves vertically to the same ideal figure (or [[idea]]), each one thus has the same self-ideal, and hence identify together (horizontal relation). Freud also quoted [[Wilfred Trotter]]'s ''The Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War'' (1914). Along with ''Moses and Monotheism'', ''Massenpsychologie...'' would be one of the articles most quoted by Wilhelm Reich and the [[Frankfurt School]] in its [[Freudo-Marxism|Freudo-Marxist]] synthesis.<br />
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==Freud's legacy==<br />
[[image:1freud-enlargement.JPG|thumb|left|200px|Freud on the Austrian 50-Schilling Note]]<br />
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=== Psychotherapy ===<br />
{{main|Psychotherapy}}<br />
Freud's theories and research methods were controversial during his life and still are so today, but few dispute his huge impact on [[psychologists]] and the academically inclined.<br />
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Most importantly, Freud popularized the "talking-cure"&mdash;an idea that a person could solve problems simply by talking over them, something that was almost unheard of in the 19th century. Even though many psychotherapists today tend to reject the specifics of Freud's theories, this basic mode of treatment comes largely from his work.<br />
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Most of Freud's specific theories&mdash;like his stages of psychosexual development&mdash;and especially his methodology, have fallen out of favor in modern [[experimental psychology]].<br />
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Some psychotherapists, however, still follow an approximately Freudian system of treatment. Many more have modified his approach, or joined one of the schools that branched from his original theories (see [[Neo-Freudian]]). Still others reject his theories entirely, although their practice may still reflect his influence.<br />
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[[Psychoanalysis]] today maintains the same ambivalent relationship with medicine and academia that Freud experienced during his life.<br />
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=== Philosophy ===<br />
While he saw himself as a scientist, yet failed to employ any aspect of the scientific method, he greatly admired [[Theodor Lipps]], a philosopher and main supporter of the ideas of the subconscious and empathy.<ref>{{cite journal| last=Pigman| first= G.W.| url=http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7628894&dopt=Abstract | title=Freud and the history of empathy| journal=The International journal of psycho-analysis| year= 1995| month=April| volume=76 (Pt 2)| pages=237-56}}</ref> Freud's theories have had a tremendous impact on the [[humanities]]--especially on the [[Frankfurt school]] and [[critical theory]]. Freud's model of the mind is often criticized as an unsubstantiated challenge to the [[Age of Enlightenment|enlightenment]] model of rational [[Agency (philosophy)|agency]], which was a key element of much [[modern philosophy]].<br />
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* '''Rationality'''. While many enlightenment thinkers viewed rationality as both an unproblematic ideal and a defining feature of man, Freud's model of the mind drastically reduced the scope and power of reason. In Freud's view, reasoning occurs in the conscious mind--the ego--but this is only a small part of the whole. The mind also contains the hidden, irrational elements of id and superego, which lie outside of conscious control, drive behavior, and motivate conscious activities. As a result, these structures call into question humans' ability to act purely on the basis of reason, since lurking motives are also always at play. Moreover, this model of the mind makes rationality itself suspect, since it may be motivated by hidden urges or societal forces (e.g. defense mechanisms, where reasoning becomes "rationalizing").<br />
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* '''Transparency of Self'''. Another common assumption in pre-Freudian philosophy was that people have immediate and unproblematic access to themselves. Emblematic of this position is [[René Descartes]]' famous [[dictum]], "''Cogito ergo sum''" ("I think, therefore I am"). For Freud, however, many central aspects of a person remain radically inaccessible to the conscious mind (without the aid of psychotherapy), which undermines the once unquestionable status of first-person knowledge.<br />
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===Critical reactions===<br />
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Although Freud's theories were quite influential, they came under widespread criticism during his lifetime and afterward. A paper by [[Lydiard H. Horton]], read in 1915 at a joint meeting of the [[American Psychological Association]] and the [[New York Academy of Sciences]], called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and noted that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psycho analytically". [[A. C. Grayling]], writing in ''The Guardian'' in 2002, said "Philosophies that capture the imagination never wholly fade....But as to Freud's claims upon truth, the judgment of time seems to be running against him." [[Peter D. Kramer]], a [[psychiatrist]] and faculty member of [[Brown Medical School]], said "I'm afraid [Freud] doesn't hold up very well at all. It almost feels like a personal betrayal to say that. But every particular is wrong: the universality of the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality." A 2006 article in [[Newsweek magazine]] called him "history's most debunked doctor."<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandthejudaeochristiantradition.html | title = Freud in Our Midst | publisher = Newsweek | date = 27 March 2006 | accessdate = 2007-03-27}}</ref><br />
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According to Richard Webster, author of ''Why Freud Was Wrong'' (1995):<br />
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{{cquote|Freud made no substantial intellectual discoveries. He was the creator of a complex pseudo-science which should be recognized as one of the great follies of Western civilisation. In creating his particular pseudo-science, Freud developed an autocratic, anti-empirical intellectual style which has contributed immeasurably to the intellectual ills of our own era. His original theoretical system, his habits of thought and his entire attitude to scientific research are so far removed from any responsible method of inquiry that no intellectual approach basing itself upon these is likely to endure.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.richardwebster.net/freudandthejudaeochristiantradition.html | title = Freud and the Judaeo-Christian tradition | publisher = The Times Literary Supplement | date = 23 May 1997 | accessdate = 2007-03-19}}</ref>}}<br />
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Other critics, like Dr. [[Frederick C. Crews]], Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California at Berkeley, and author of ''The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute'' (1995), are even more blunt: <br />
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{{cquote|He was a charlatan. In 1896 he published three papers on the ideology of hysteria claiming that he had cured X number of patients. First it was thirteen and then it was eighteen. And he had cured them all by presenting them, or rather by obliging them to remember, that they had been sexually abused as children. In 1897 he lost faith in this theory, but he'd told his colleagues that this was the way to cure hysteria. So he had a scientific obligation to tell people about his change of mind. But he didn't. He didn't even hint at it until 1905, and even then he wasn't clear. Meanwhile, where were the thirteen patients? Where were the eighteen patients? You read the Freud - Fleiss letters and you find that Freud's patients were leaving at the time. By 1897 he didn't have any patients worth mentioning, and he hadn't cured any of them, and he knew it perfectly well. Well, if a scientist did that today, of course he would be stripped of his job. He would be stripped of his research funds. He would be disgraced for life. But Freud was so brilliant at controlling his own legend that people can hear charges like this, and even admit that they're true, and yet not have their faith in the system of thought affected in any way.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://globetrotter.berkeley.edu/people/Crews/crews-con3.html | title = Frederick Crews Interview | publisher = Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley| year = 1999 | first = Harry | last = Kreisler | accessdate = 2007-03-19}}</ref>}}<br />
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Another frequently criticized aspect of Freud's theories is his model of psychosexual development. Some have attacked Freud's claim that infants are sexual beings, and, implicitly, Freud's expanded notion of sexuality. Others have accepted Freud's expanded notion of sexuality, but have argued that this pattern of development is not universal, nor necessary for the development of a healthy adult. Instead, they have emphasized the social and environmental sources of patterns of development. Moreover, they call attention to [[social dynamics]] Freud de-emphasized or ignored, such as class relations. This branch of Freudian critique owes a great deal to the work of [[Herbert Marcuse]]. <br />
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Freud has also come under fire from many [[feminist]] critics. Freud was an early champion of both sexual freedom and education for women (Freud, "[[Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness]]"). Some feminists, however, have argued that at worst his views of women's sexual development set the progress of women in [[Western culture]] back decades, and that at best they lent themselves to the ideology of female inferiority. Believing as he did that women are a kind of mutilated male, who must learn to accept their "deformity" (the "lack" of a penis) and submit to some imagined biological imperative, he contributed to the vocabulary of [[misogyny]]. Terms such as "[[penis envy]]" and "[[castration anxiety]]" contributed to discouraging women from entering any field dominated by men, until the 1970s. Some of Freud's most criticized statements appear in his 'Fragment of Analysis' on [[Ida Bauer]] such as "''This was surely just the situation to call up distinct feelings of sexual excitement in a girl of fourteen''" in reference to Dora being kissed by a 'young man of prepossessing appearance'<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28">S.E. 7. pp28</ref> implying the passivity of female sexuality and his statement "''I should without question consider a person hysterical in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable''"<ref name="S.E. 7. pp28" /><br />
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On the other hand, [[feminist theory|feminist theorists]] such as [[Juliet Mitchell]], [[Nancy Chodorow]], [[Jessica Benjamin]], [[Jane Gallop]], and [[Jane Flax]] have argued that psychoanalytic theory is essentially related to the feminist project and must, like other theoretical traditions, be adapted by women to free it from vestiges of sexism. Freud's views are still being questioned by people concerned about women's equality. Another feminist who finds potential use of Freud's theories in the feminist movement is [[Shulamith Firestone]]. In "Freudianism: The Misguided Feminism", she discusses how Freudianism is essentially completely accurate, with the exception of one crucial detail: everywhere that Freud wrote "penis", the word should be replaced with "power". <br />
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Dr. Jurgen von Scheidt speculated that most of Freud's psychoanalytical theory was a byproduct of his cocaine use.<ref>{{cite journal | last = Scheidt | first = Jürgen vom | year = 1973 | title = Sigmund Freud and cocaine | journal = Psyche | pages = pp. 385&ndash;430 }}</ref> Cocaine enhances dopaminergic neurotransmission increasing sexual interest and obsessive thinking. Chronic [[cocaine]] use can produce unusual thinking patterns due to the depletion of [[dopamine]] levels in the prefrontal [[cortex]].<br />
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Finally, Freud's theories are often criticized for not being real science.<ref>Ludwig, 1973, pg. 93</ref> This objection was raised most famously by [[Karl Popper]], who claimed that all proper [[scientific theories]] must be potentially [[falsifiable]]. Popper argued that no experiment or observation could ever falsify Freud's theories of psychology (e.g. someone who denies having an Oedipal complex is interpreted as repressing it), and thus they could not be considered scientific.<ref>Karl Popper, “Philosophy of Science: A Personal Report,” in ''British Philosophy in the Mid-Century: A Cambridge Symposium'', ed. C. A. Mace (1957), 155-91; reprinted in Karl Popper, ''Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge'' (1963; 2d ed., 1965), 33-65.</ref> Some proponents of science conclude that this standard invalidates Freudian theory as a means of interpreting and explaining human behavior.<br />
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However, despite the aforementioned criticisms, scientific research has provided some support for Freudian theories. Indeed, recent research on the neuropsychology of dreaming indicates that Freud's dream theory (long thought to be discredited) is consistent with what is currently known about the dreaming brain. These findings have lead to the development of a new discipline, neuropsychoanalysis, which seeks to discover the neurological foundation of psychoanalytic theories.<br />
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Freudian theory has given way to dozens of other theories during the 20th century. As a "for instance," notable Christian theorists such as Dr. James Dobson, Dr. Gary Smalley and Dr. Bill McDonald, who practice a more modern cognitive-behavioral approach, have experienced extremely good results over the course of several decades.<br />
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==Patients==<br />
This is a partial list of patients whose case studies were published by Freud, with pseudonyms substituted for their names:<br />
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[[Image:Freud_Sofa.JPG|thumb|240px|Freud's couch used during psychoanalytic sessions]]<br />
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* [[Anna O.]] = Bertha Pappenheim (1859&ndash;1936)<br />
* Cäcilie M. = Anna von Lieben<br />
* Dora = [[Ida Bauer]] (1882&ndash;1945)<br />
* Frau Emmy von N. = Fanny Moser<br />
* Fräulein Elizabeth von R.<br />
* Fräulein Katharina = Aurelia Kronich<br />
* Fräulein Lucy R.<br />
* [[Oedipus complex#Little Hans: a case study by Freud|Little Hans]] = [[Herbert Graf]] (1903&ndash;1973)<br />
* [[Rat Man]] = Ernst Lanzer (1878&ndash;1914)<br />
* [[Sergei Pankejeff|Wolf Man]] = Sergei Pankejeff (1887&ndash;1979)<br />
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Other patients:<br />
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* [[H.D.]] (1886&ndash;1961)<br />
* [[Emma Eckstein]] (1865&ndash;1924)<br />
* [[Gustav Mahler]] (1860&ndash;1911)<br />
* [[Princess Marie Bonaparte]]<br />
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People on whom psychoanalytic observations were published but who were not patients:<br />
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* [[Daniel Paul Schreber]] (1842&ndash;1911)<br />
* [[Woodrow Wilson]] (1856&ndash;1924) (co-authored with and primarily written by [[William Bullitt]])<br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
In a passage Žižek does not seem to cite, Freud links philosophy and the joke:<blockquote>“There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy”, said Prince Hamlet contemptuously. Lichtenberg knew that this condemnation is not nearly severe enough, for it does not take into account all the objections that can be made to philosophy. He therefore added what was missing: “But there is much, too, in philosophy that is not to be found in heaven or earth”. (''[[Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious]]'', ''SE'' VIII: 72)</blockquote>Philosophy – says the joke – misses its target, always falling short or carrying on too far. The one thing it does not do in its relations to heaven and earth is coincide with them. Freud also uses that phrase, without irony, as a piece of wisdom, in at least three other places. Two of them speak to his fascination with the possibility of telepathy: the 1921 paper on “Psychoanalysis and Telepathy” (''SE'' XVIII: 178), and the lecture on “Dreams and Occultism” from the 1933 ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'' (SE XXII: 31). He concludes his introductory remarks to [[Wolf Man|the Wolf Man case]] history with the admission that even though the case is a good fit for current psychoanalytic knowledge (as indeed he needs it to be, for this is the case he wants to be the watershed for the various heresies that had been arising within the psychoanalytic camp), many of the details of it are “so extraordinary and incredible that I felt some hesitation in asking other people to believe them”. After that, “there was nothing left for me but to remember the wise saying that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy” (''SE'' XVII: 34). In all three of those later invocations, it is not used as a way of claiming a superior knowledge for psychoanalysis, but of saying that psychoanalysis does not know either. Psychoanalysis meets philosophy on this excess, this point that is both too much to fit into the knowledge either provides, and the too-little explanation either can off er. Psychoanalysis does not so much abandon philosophy as take in philosophy as its symptom.<br />
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Freud will usually say that he has no use for philosophy, which is in no “position to tell you anything serviceable of the relation between body and mind or to provide you with a key to an understanding of possible disturbances of the mental function” (''[[Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis]]'', ''SE'' XV: 20). What he is interested in is the particular. That is at the heart of his rejection of the popular “dream books” (''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'', ''SE'' IV: 97–9): instead of decoding the dream according to universal equivalences, the analyst needs to look for the “residues of the day”, those traces of the specific and complex contingencies of a life that make psychoanalysis into something like a science of biography. ''[[The Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' some five years later (''SE'' VII: 123–245) will extend this focus on contingency to the drives themselves, whose aims and objects are similarly contingent and incalculable in advance. Drive, as Žižek will insist repeatedly (e.g. ''LA'': 32, 37; ''TS'': 293; ''PV'': 110; ''LN'': 495–6), is even the name for this perpetual discord. “It is here”, Žižek suggests, “that we should perhaps look for the basic premise of the Freudian theory of culture” (''LA'': 37).<br />
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And it is here, again, that we meet philosophy on this point of excess. Th e remnants of the day and the discord of drive are for Žižek versions of the Hegelian refrain, “The Spirit is a bone”, that runs through his work (e.g. ''SO'': 207–12; ''TN'': 34–5, 51, 62, 85; ''TS'': 88–9, 92–3; ''OB'': 143; ''PV'': 5, 33, 77, 84; ''ET'': 26). Following this logic of the general in the particular and the genus in the species, we could say that (1) the subject is the contingent; (2) but this is nonsense, there is an absolute contradiction between the two terms; and (3) that very contradiction is precisely the subject (see, for example, ''ET'': 534).We could say something similar of the relationship between psychoanalysis and philosophy: it is not that they are just versions of each other, at heart saying the same thing, but that in the deep and insistent contradictions between them each finds that extimacy of what is in it more than it. Freud is a thinker of the Real, and in that an anti-philosopher in the same sense as Lacan: “Not ‘I am not a philosopher’, but ‘I am a not-philosopher’, that is, I stand for the excessive core of philosophy itself, for what is in philosophy more than philosophy” (''PV'': 389).<br />
<br />
For Žižek, as for Badiou, “The basic motif of anti-philosophy is the assertion of a pure presence (the Real Life of society for [[Karl Marx|Marx]], Existence for [[Søren Kierkegaard|Kierkegaard]], Will for [[Schopenhauer]] and [[Friedrich Nietzsche|Nietzsche]], etc.), irreducible to and excessive with regard to the network of philosophical concepts or representations” (''LN'': 841). Žižek finds in Freud that concern with the figure of rupture and event that runs through [[Walter Benjamin|Benjamin]] to [[Badiou]]. The Freudian subject is one whose time is out of joint with itself, and that exists only in this inconsistency (''LN'': 380), shot through with those chips of what Benjamin calls Messianic time (Benjamin 1973: 254– 5). We see this in the much-debated “''Wo es war, soll ich werden''” of the ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', and which Žižek along with Lacan translates as “Where it was, I shall come into being” (Freud, ''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 80; Žižek uses this translation in the editorial description of books in Verso’s ''Wo Es War'' series, which he edits): one clause is in the past tense and the other in the future, as if that “it” and “I” were out of phase with each other. In the same lectures, Freud famously suggests that “One gets an impression that a man’s love and a woman’s are a phase apart psychologically” (''[[New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis|New Introductory Lectures]]'', SE XXII: 134). But Freud’s is an incomplete anti-philosophy, for he cannot think the radical exteriority of trauma (ET: 295) and thus its purely political dimension. Žižek finds that dimension in Lacan’s claim to replace Freudian energetics with political economy (''PV'': 50), and in his insistence on the matheme as Real.<br />
<br />
One of Žižek’s most frequent sets of references to this inconsistency and excess of the subject and the symbolic comes directly or indirectly from Freud’s great cultural myth of the primordial father in the 1913 ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (''SE'' XIII: 1–161). Žižek spends far more time here than with that other great Freudian myth, [[Oedipus]], which he describes as the obverse of the [[primordial father]]: if Oedipus is about how one deals with the agent of the [[Law’s prohibition]], the killing of the primordial father is what gives rise to that Law (''TS'': 315). As the Hegelian logic of “the Spirit is a bone” suggests, though, it does this not by providing an impossible narrative of the transition between nature and culture, but by suggesting the way in which what is unrepresentable in such a narrative is the very (and impossible) conditions of possibility for both terms, and of the clarity of the Law that gives sha''p''e to both of them (''OB'': 74). It is not that the symbolic and its Law are inhabited by an untellable and unnarratable mystery, but that the trauma of the Real of the constitutive act inhabits the symbolic as the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]] (LA: 23).<br />
<br />
In the myth of the primordial father, we have the beginnings of Lacan’s various and ongoing formalizations of this impasse. The four discourses of Seminar XVII (''[[The Other Side of Psychoanalysis]]''), which he insists are cultural structures, provide the matrix of the possibilities of address. Their permutations circle the [[Name-of-the-Father|Name of the Father]], inflecting the struggle of the sons with the father into the daughter’s struggle: the Master names the Event, but it is the hysteric who challenges the master (''TS'': 164). In the mathemes of sexuation, we have the primordial father as the exception to the Law founded by that very exceptionality, and the excessive and non-phallic ''[[jouissance]]'' it generates. The myth lends itself also in Žižek to a fertile theorization of politics, one that seeks to avoid the disavowals of ''[[Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego]]'' (''SE'' XVIII: 65–143), in which the political dimension is reduced to the figure of the “crowd” (TS: 191–2). Freud, Žižek argues, misses the sheer fanaticism that results from the undoing of the social bond (''LN'': 452), and the way in which the decline in Oedipal symbolic authority that characterizes late-capitalist liberal democracies is the obverse of the return of the primordial father as the agent of an obscene enjoyment (e.g. ME: 206; TS: 315; OB: 101; PD: 130), from the “totalitarian” leader to Hannibal Lecter. From his first formulation of the [[superego]], Freud is aware of its inherent and necessary contradiction, and the double bind in which it demands both that “You ''ought to be'' like this” and that “You ''may not be'' like this” (''[[The Ego and the Id]]'', ''SE'' XIX: 34). Žižek sharpens this into the single contradiction, “Enjoy!”; this superego imperative of late capitalist liberal democracy thus provides a radical re-interpretation of [[Louis Althusser|Althusser’s]] well-known theory of ideology as interpellation (e.g. ''TK'':108–9; ''TN'' 73–7; ''ME'': 59–62; ''TS'': 257–60).<br />
<br />
==Notes==<br />
{{reflist}}<br />
<br />
*Corey, Gerald (2000). Theory and Practice of Counseling and Psychotherapy. 6th ed. ISBN: 0534348238<br />
<br />
==Bibliography==<br />
<div class="references-small" style="-moz-column-count:2; column-count:2;"><br />
===Major works by Freud===<br />
<br />
* ''[[Studies on Hysteria]]'' (with [[Josef Breuer]]) (''Studien über Hysterie'', 1895)<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Interpretation of Dreams]]'' (''Die Traumdeutung'', 1899 [1900])<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]'' (''Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens'', 1901)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality]]'' (''Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie'', 1905)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious]]'' (''Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten'', 1905)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Totem and Taboo]]'' (''Totem und Tabu'', 1913)<br />
<br />
* ''[[On Narcissism]]'' (''Zur Einführung des Narzißmus'', 1914)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'' (''Jenseits des Lustprinzips'', 1920)<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Ego and the Id]]'' (''Das Ich und das Es'', 1923)<br />
<br />
* ''[[The Future of an Illusion]]'' (''Die Zukunft einer Illusion'', 1927)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Civilization and Its Discontents]]'' (''Das Unbehagen in der Kultur'', 1930)<br />
<br />
* ''[[Moses and Monotheism]]'' (''Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion'', 1939)<br />
<br />
* ''[[An Outline of Psycho-Analysis]]'' (''Abriß der Psychoanalyse'', 1940)<br />
<br />
===Books about Freud and psychoanalysis===<br />
<br />
* [[Ernest Jones]] : "The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.", Publisher: Basic Books, 1981, ISBN 0-465-04015-2<br />
* "The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939, R. Andrew Paskauskas (Editor), Riccardo Steiner (Introduction), Publisher: Belknap Press; Reprint edition 1995, ISBN 0-674-15424-X <br />
* "The Language of Psycho-Analysis" , [[Jean Laplanche]] et J.B. Pontalis, Editeur: W. W. Norton & Company, 1974, ISBN 0-393-01105-4<br />
* "Sigmund Freud and [[Lou Andreas-Salome]]" : Letters" Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 1985), ISBN 0-393-30261-X<br />
* [[Lou Andreas-Salome]] : "The Freud Journal" , Publisher: Texas Bookman, 1996, ISBN 0-7043-0022-2<br />
* [[Sabina Spielrein]] : "Destruction as cause of becoming", 1993, {{OCLC|44450080}}<br />
* [[Marthe Robert]] : "The Psychoanalytic Revolution", Publisher: Avon Books; Discus ed edition, 1968, {{OCLC|2401215}} <br />
* [[Bruno Bettelheim]] : "Freud and Man's Soul: An Important Re-Interpretation of Freudian Theory" Publisher: Vintage; Vintage edition, 1983, ISBN 0-394-71036-3<br />
* [[André Green]]: "The Work of the Negative" by Andre Green, Andrew Weller (Translator), Publisher: Free Association Books, 1999, ISBN 1-85343-470-1<br />
* André Green: "On Private Madness", Publisher: International Universities Press, 1997, ISBN 0-8236-3853-7<br />
* André Green: "The Chains of Eros", Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 1-85575-960-8<br />
* André Green: "Psychoanalysis: A Paradigm For Clinical Thinking" Publisher: Free Association Books, 2005, ISBN 1-85343-773-5<br />
* John Farrell. ''Freud's Paranoid Quest: Psychoanalysis and Modern Suspicion'' (NYU Press, 1996). A vigorous account of the relations between Freud's logic, rhetoric, and personality, as well as his relations with literary sources like Cervantes, Goethe, and Swift.<br />
* Rieff, Philip. ''Freud: The Mind of the Moralist'', 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). <br />
* Roazen, Paul. ''Freud and His Followers'' (Random House, 1975). A rich study of the development of psychoanalysis, based upon many personal interviews.<br />
*[[Elisabeth Young-Bruehl|Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth]] (1992). ''Freud on Women: A Reader''. Norton. ISBN 0-393-30870-7.<br />
*Anthony Bateman and Jeremy Holmes, ''Introduction to Psychoanalysis: Contemporary Theory & Practice'' (London: Routledge, 1995)<br />
* Isbister, J. N. "Freud, An Introduction to his Life and Work" Publisher: Polity Press: Cambridge, Oxford. (1985)<br />
*[[Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson]], ''The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory'', Ballantine Books (November 2003), ISBN 0-345-45279-8<br />
<br />
===Conceptual critiques===<br />
<br />
* Robert Aziz, ''The Syndetic Paradigm:The Untrodden Path Beyond Freud and Jung'' (2007), a refereed publication of The [[State University of New York Press]]. ISBN-13:978-0-7914-6982-8.<br />
* [[Mortimer Adler|Adler, Mortimer J.]], ''What Man Has Made of Man: A Study of the Consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology'' (New York: Longmans, Green, 1937). (A philosophical critique from an Aristotelian/Thomistic point of view.)<br />
<br />
* Cioffi, Frank. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1998.<br />
<br />
* [[Gilles Deleuze|Deleuze, Gilles]] and [[Félix Guattari|Guattari, Félix]], ''Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia'', trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London and New York: Continuum, 2004). (This first volume of the famous two-part work (also subtitled ''Capitalism and Schizophrenia'') [[wiktionary:polemic|polemic]]ises Freud's argument that the Oedipal complex determines subjectivity. It is also, therefore, a staunch critique of the [[Lacan]]ian 'return to Freud.)<br />
<br />
* [[Henri Ellenberger]], ''The Discovery of the [[Unconscious mind|Unconscious]]: the History and Evolution of Dynamic [[Psychiatry]]'' (London: Penguin, 1970). (An extensive account and sensitive critique of Freudian metapsychology.) (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger)<br />
<br />
* Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.<br />
<br />
* [[Hans Eysenck|Eysenck, H. J.]] and Wilson, G. D. ''The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories'', Methuen, London (1973).<br />
<br />
* Eysenck, Hans, ''Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'' (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1986).<br />
<br />
*Hobson, J. Allan Hobson, ''Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). ISBN 0-19-280482-0. (Critique of Freud's dream theory in terms of current neuroscience)<br />
<br />
* Johnston, Thomas, ''Freud and Political Thought'' (New York: Citadel, 1965). (One of the more accessible accounts of the import of Freudianism for political theory.)<br />
<br />
* [[Sarah Kofman|Kofman, Sarah]], ''The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's Writings'' (Ithaca, NY, & London: Cornell University Press, 1985).<br />
<br />
* Simonsen, Sean "I'm Okay, Freud is a Crackpot: Collected Essays on Denial" [http://www.standlikearock.com/forums "Stand Like A Rock"]<br />
<br />
* [[Herbert Marcuse|Marcuse, Herbert]], ''Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud'' (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974). (Mentioned above. For a good review, see Stirk, Peter M. R., ‘''Eros and Civilization'' revisited’, ''History of the Human Sciences'', 12 (1), 1999, pp. 73&ndash;90.)<br />
<br />
* Mitchell, Juliet. ''Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis'' Originally published in 1974; Basic Books reissue (2000) ISBN 0-465-04608-8<br />
<br />
* [[Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel|Chasseguet-Smirgel, Janine]] & Grunberger, Béla. ''Freud or Reich? Psychoanalysis and Illusion.'' (London: Free Association Books, 1986)<br />
<br />
* Neu, Jerome (ed.), ''The Cambridge Companion to Freud'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). (A good conceptual overview.)<br />
<br />
* [[Paul Ricoeur|Ricoeur, Paul]], ''Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation'', trans. Denis Savage (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1972). <br />
<br />
*—, ''The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics'', ed. Don Ihde (London: Continuum, 2004). (A critical examination of the import of Freud for philosophy.)<br />
<br />
* Roazen, Paul. Freud and His Followers (New York: Random House, 1975).<br />
<br />
* [[Thomas Szasz|Szasz, Thomas]]. ''Anti-Freud: Karl Kraus's Criticism of Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry'', Syracuse University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-8156-0247-2. <br />
<br />
* Torrey, E. Fuller (1992). Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture. New York, NY : HarperCollins.<br />
* [[Valentin Voloshinov|Voloshinov, Valentin]]. ''Freudianism: A Marxist critique'', Academic Press (1976) ISBN 0-12-723250-8<br />
<br />
* Wollheim, Richard, ''Freud'', 2nd edn. (London: Fontana, 1991). (A good starting point.)<br />
<br />
===Biographies===<br />
<br />
The area of biography has been especially contentious in the [[historiography]] of psychoanalysis, for two primary reasons: first, following his death, significant portions of his personal papers were for several decades made available only at the permission of his biological and intellectual heirs (his daughter, Anna Freud, was extremely protective of her father's reputation); second, much of the data and theory of Freudian psychoanalysis hinges upon the personal testimony of Freud himself, and so to challenge Freud's legitimacy or honesty has been seen by many as an attack on the roots of his enduring work.<br />
<br />
The first biographies of Freud were written by Freud himself: his ''On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement'' (1914) and ''An Autobiographical Study'' (1924) provided much of the basis for discussions by later biographers, including "debunkers" (as they contain a number of prominent omissions and potential misrepresentations). A few of the major biographies on Freud to come out over the 20th century were:<br />
*Helen Walker Puner, ''Freud: His Life and His Mind'' (1947) &mdash; Puner's "facts" were often shaky at best but she was remarkably insightful with regard to Freud's unanalyzed relationship to his mother, Amalia. <br />
<br />
* [[Ernest Jones]], ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud'', 3 vols. (1953&ndash;1958) &mdash; the first "authorized" biography of Freud, made by one of his former students with the authorization and assistance of Anna Freud, with the hope of "dispelling the myths" from earlier biographies. Though this is the most comprehensive biography of Freud, Jones has been accused of writing more of a hagiography than a history of Freud. Among his questionable assertions, Jones diagnosed his own analyst, Ferenczi, as "psychotic." In the same breath, Jones also maligned Otto Rank, Ferenczi's close friend and Jones's most important rival for leadership of the movement in the 1920s. <br />
<br />
* [[Henri Ellenberger]], ''The Discovery of the Unconscious'' (1970) &mdash; was the first book to, in a compelling way, attempt to situate Freud within the context of his time and intellectual thought, arguing that he was the intellectual heir of [[Franz Mesmer]] and that the genesis of his theory owed a large amount to the political context of turn of the 19th century Vienna. (Swiss link: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_F._Ellenberger) <br />
<br />
* Frank Sulloway, ''Freud: Biologist of the Mind'' (1979) &mdash; Sulloway, one of the first professional/academic historians to write a biography of Freud, positioned Freud within the larger context of the [[history of science]], arguing specifically that Freud was, in fact, a biologist in disguise (a "crypto-biologist", in Sulloway's terms), and sought to actively hide this.<br />
<br />
* [[Peter Gay]], ''Freud: A Life for Our Time'' (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988) &mdash; Gay's impressively scholarly work was published in part as a response to the anti-Freudian literature and the "Freud Wars" of the 1980s (see below). Gay's book is probably the best pro-Freud biography available, though he is not completely uncritical of his hero. His "Bibliographical Essay" at the end of the volume provides astute evaluations of the voluminous literature on Freud up to the mid-1980s.<br />
<br />
* Breger, Louis. "Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision." (New York: Wiley, 2000). Though written from a psychoanalytic point of view (the author is a former President of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis), this is a "warts and all" life of Sigmund Freud. It corrects, in the light of historical research of recent decades, many (though not quite all) of several disputed traditional historical accounts of events uncritically recycled by Peter Gay. <br />
<br />
The creation of Freud biographies has itself even been written about at some length&mdash;see, for example, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, "A History of Freud Biographies," in ''Discovering the History of Psychiatry'', edited by Mark S. Micale and [[Roy Porter]] (Oxford University Press, 1994).<br />
<br />
===Biographical critiques===<br />
<br />
* Bakan, David. ''Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition'', D. Van Nostrand Company, 1958; New York, Schocken Books, 1965; Dover Publications, 2004. ISBN 0-486-43767-1<br />
<br />
* Crews, F. C. ''Unauthorized Freud : doubters confront a legend'', New York, Viking 1998. ISBN 0-670-87221-0<br />
<br />
* Dolnick, Edward. ''Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis'' ISBN 0-684-82497-3<br />
<br />
* Dufresne, T. ''Killing Freud'', Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.<br />
<br />
* Esterson, Allen, "Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud." Chicago: Open Court, 1993.<br />
<br />
* Eysenck, H. J. ''The Decline and Fall of the Freudian Empire'', Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D. C., (1990) <br />
<br />
* Jurjevich, R. M. ''The Hoax of Freudism: A study of Brainwashing the American Professionals and Laymen'' Dorrance (1974) ISBN 0-8059-1856-6<br />
<br />
* LaPiere, R. T. ''The Freudian Ethic: An Analysis of the Subversion of Western Character'' Greenwood Press (1974) ISBN 0-8371-7543-7<br />
<br />
* [[Jonathan Lear|Lear, Jonathan]]. ''Freud'' Routledge (2005) ISBN 0-415-31451-8<br />
<br />
* [[Emil_Ludwig|Ludwig, Emil]], ''Doctor Freud'', Manor Books, New York, 1973 <br />
<br />
* [[Kevin B. MacDonald|MacDonald, Kevin B]]. ''The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements'' Authorhouse (2002) ISBN 0-7596-7222-9<br />
<br />
* Macmillan, Malcolm. ''Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc'' MIT Press, 1996 ISBN 0-262-63171-7 [originally published by New Holland, 1991]<br />
<br />
* Scharnberg, Max. ''The non-authentic nature of Freud's observations'', Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1993 ISBN 91-554-3122-4<br />
<br />
* Stannard, D. E. ''Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory'' Oxford University Press, Oxford (1980) ISBN 0-19-503044-3<br />
<br />
* Thornton, E. M. ''Freud and Cocaine: The Freudian Fallacy'', Blond & Briggs, London (1983) ISBN 0-85634-139-8<br />
<br />
* Webster, Richard. ''Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science, and Psychoanalysis'' BasicBooks, 1995. ISBN 0-465-09579-8<br />
<br />
* Sonia Montero Padilla contributed to this page.<br />
</div><br />
<br />
==See also==<br />
===Topics===<br />
{{col-begin}}<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[American Psychoanalytic Association]]<br />
* [[Freudian slip]]<br />
* [[Freudo-Marxism]]<br />
* [[Neo-Freudian]]<br />
* [[Penis envy]]<br />
* [[Psychic energy]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalysis]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[History of hypnosis#Psychoanalysis and Hypnotherapy|Psychoanalysis and Hypnotherapy]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalytic literary criticism]]<br />
* [[Psychoanalytic theory]]<br />
* [[Psychodynamics]]<br />
* [[Psychological projection]]<br />
* [[Psychology of religion]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Psychosexual development]]<br />
** [[Oral stage]]<br />
** [[Anal stage]]<br />
** [[Phallic stage]]<br />
** [[Genital stage]]<br />
* [[Psychotherapy]]<br />
* [[Shame]]<br />
* [[Unconscious mind]]<br />
{{col-end}}<br />
<br />
===People===<br />
{{col-begin}}<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Alfred Adler|Adler, Alfred]]<br />
* [[Josef Breuer|Breuer, Josef]]<br />
* [[Edward L. Bernays|Edward Bernays]]<br />
* [[Jean-Martin Charcot|Charcot, Jean-Martin]]<br />
* [[Erik Erikson|Erikson, Erik]]<br />
* [[Wilhelm Fliess|Fliess, Wilhelm]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Viktor Frankl]]<br />
* [[Anna Freud|Freud, Anna]]<br />
* [[Georg Groddeck|Groddeck, Georg]]<br />
* [[Boris Sidis]]<br />
* [[Wilfred Bion]]<br />
* [[Karen Horney|Horney, Karen]]<br />
* [[Ernest Jones|Jones, Ernest]]<br />
* [[Carl Jung|Jung, Carl]]<br />
* [[Melanie Klein|Klein, Melanie]]<br />
{{col-break}}<br />
* [[Jacques Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]<br />
* [[Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson|Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff]]<br />
* [[Otto Rank|Rank, Otto]]<br />
* [[Wilhelm Reich|Reich, Wilhelm]]<br />
* [[Herbert Silberer|Silberer, Herbert]]<br />
* [[Charles Darwin|Darwin, Charles]]<br />
{{col-end}}<br />
<br />
==External links==<br />
{{commons|Sigmund Freud}}<br />
{{wikiquote}}<br />
{{wikisource author}}<br />
* [http://www.pribor.cz/ PŘÍBOR-Freud birth place]<br />
* [http://www.freud.org.uk/ Freud Museum in London]<br />
* [http://www.freudfile.org/ Sigmund Freud Life and Work]<br />
* [http://www.worldwideschool.org/library/books/phil/psychology/ScientificMethodInTheInterpretationOfDreams/Chap1.html Scientific Method in the Interpretation of Dreams]<br />
* [http://www.ipa.org.uk/ International Psychoanalytical Association, founded by Freud in 1910] <br />
* [http://books.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4445608-99939,00.html Scientist or storyteller?]<br />
* [http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/1_gesamt_en.html International Network of Freud Critics]<br />
* [http://www.iceion.com/philo/philo.php?page=freud Freud's Philosophy]<br />
* [http://www.freud-museum.at/ Sigmund Freud Museum, Berggasse 19, Vienna]<br />
* [https://docushop.at/en/detail.asp?p_id=301 Sigmund Freud Movie about Berggasse 19]<br />
* [http://www.positivehealth.com/permit/Articles/Regular/litt55.htm One Hundred Years of Sigmund Freud]<br />
* [http://atheisme.free.fr/Biographies/Freud_e.htm Sigmund Freud Biography and Quotations]<br />
* [http://www.britannica.com/original?content_id=1309 Sigmund Freud's article on Psychoanalysis from the 1926 (Thirteenth) edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica]<br />
* [http://www.sfi-frankfurt.de/ Sigmund-Freud-Institut]<br />
* [http://www.freudarchives.org/ Freud Archives at Library of Congress]<br />
* [http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/freud_e.html ''Freud's Unwritten Case: The Patient "E."'' by Douglas A. Davis]<br />
*[http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com/Article/The-Darwin-of-the-Mind/139 The Darwin of the Mind]<br />
<br />
* {{gutenberg author| id=Sigmund+Freud | name=Sigmund Freud}}<br />
* [http://www.robertaziz.com Website of leading Freud-Jungian scholar/ author, Dr. Robert Aziz]<br />
* {{es icon}} [http://www.enfocarte.com/7.31/filosofia1.html Nietzsche y Freud; la ficcion del sujeto y las seducciones de la gramatica] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD<br />
* {{es icon}} [http://www.box.net/index.php?rm=box_download_shared_file&file_id=f_44672761&shared_name=9ykgpnv487 La influencia de Nietzsche sobre Freud] by Adolfo Vasquez Rocca PhD<br />
*[http://essays.quotidiana.org/freud/ Essays by Freud at Quotidiana.org]<br />
<br />
[[Category:Sigmund Freud]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalytic theory]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian psychiatrists]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian psychologists]]<br />
[[Category:Developmental psychologists]]<br />
[[Category:Freud family]]<br />
[[Category:Psychodynamics]]<br />
[[Category:History of mental health]]<br />
[[Category:History of neuroscience]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy of sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian philosophers]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysts]]<br />
[[Category:20th century philosophers]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian atheists]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian emigrants]]<br />
[[Category:Austrian Jews]]<br />
[[Category:Czech expatriates]]<br />
[[Category:Jewish scientists]]<br />
[[Category:People from Vienna]]<br />
[[Category:Doctors who committed suicide]]<br />
[[Category:Drug-related suicides]]<br />
[[Category:Deaths by euthanasia]]<br />
[[Category:Psychology writers]]<br />
[[Category:1856 births]]<br />
[[Category:1939 deaths]]<br />
<br />
=====Where=====<br />
[[Freud]] was born in Moravia in 1856 but his family moved to Vienna in 1860.<br />
<br />
The city remained his home until 1938 when the ''Anschluss'', the incorporation of Austria into the Nazi Reich, obliged him to make a reluctant departure for London.<br />
<br />
=====Student=====<br />
[[Freud]] graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1881, and his early research and publications dealt with anatomy and physiology.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
=====References=====<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:People|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Sigmund Freud|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Freudian psychology|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
[[Category:Looking Awry|Freud, Sigmund]]<br />
<br />
{{Encore}}<br />
:* [[Freud, S.]], 3''n'', 11''n'', 15, 37n, 50, 53, 55, 61-62, 66, 77, 80, 89, 91, 96, 100, 105, 108-9, 112, 115, 120, 121, 126 <br />
:: [[Lacan]] and, 41, 47, 97 <br />
:: on [[perversion]], 86-87 <br />
:: on [[reality]], 55-56 <br />
:: [[women]] and, 72, 74-75, 80, 86-87, 99, 127</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fetish/Fetishistic_disavowal&diff=43774Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal2019-04-15T22:53:13Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Top}}fétichisme{{Bottom}} <br />
<br />
==Definition==<br />
The term "[[fetishism|fetish]]" first came into widespread use in the eighteenth century in the context of the study of "[[religion|primitive religions]]", in which it denoted an inanimate object of worship.<br />
<br />
In the nineteenth century, [[Marx]] borrowed the term to describe the way that, in capitalist societies, social relations assume the illusory form of relations between things ("[[commodity fetishism]]]").<br />
<br />
==Perversion==<br />
It was Krafft-Ebing who, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, first applied the term to [[sexuality|sexual behavior]].<br />
<br />
He defined [[fetishism]] as a [[perversion|sexual perversion]] in which [[enjoyment|sexual excitement]] is absolute dependent on the [[presence]] of a specific [[object]] (the [[fetishism|fetish]]).<br />
<br />
The [[fetishism|fetish]] is usually an inanimate [[object]] such as a shoe or piece of underwear.<br />
<br />
==Sigmund Freud==<br />
[[Freud]] argued that [[fetishism]] (seen as an almost exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]]) originates in the [[child]]'s horror of [[female]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
Confronted with the [[mother]]'s [[lack]] of a [[penis]], the [[fetishism|fetishist]] [[disavow]]s this [[lack]] and finds an [[object]] (the [[fetish]]) as a [[symbolic]] [[substitute]] for the mother's [[lack|missing]] [[penis]].<ref>{{F}}. "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Jacques Lacan==<br />
In [[Lacan]]'s first approach to the subject of [[fetishism]], in 1956, he argues that [[fetishism]] is a particularly important area of study and bemoans its neglect by his contemporaries. <br />
<br />
He stresses that the equivalence between the [[fetishism|fetish]] and the [[mother|maternal]] [[phallus]] can only be understood by reference to [[linguistic]] transformations, and not by reference to "vague analogies in the visual field" such as comparisons between fur and pubic hair."<ref>{{L}} "[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Variantes de la cure-type]]", in {{E}} [1956b]. p. 267)</ref><br />
<br />
He cites [[Freud]]'s [[analysis]] of the phrase "''Glanz auf der Nase''" as support for his argument.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Penis and Phallus==<br />
In the following years, as [[Lacan]] develops his distinction between the [[penis]] and [[phallus]], he emphasises that the [[fetishism|fetish]] is a substitute for the latter, not the former. <br />
<br />
==Disavowal==<br />
[[Lacan]] also extends the mechanism of [[disavowal]], making it the operation constitutive of [[perversion]] itself, and not just of the [[fetishism|fetishistic]] [[perversion]]. <br />
<br />
==Male Perversion==<br />
However, he retains [[Freud]]'s view that [[fetishism]] is an exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]],<ref>{{Ec}} p. 734</ref> or at least extremely rare among [[women]].<ref>{{S4}} p.154</ref><br />
<br />
==Phobic Object==<br />
In the [[seminar]] of 1956-7, [[Lacan]] elaborates an important distinction between the [[fetishism|fetish]] [[object]] and the [[phobic]] [[object]]; whereas the [[fetish]] is a [[fetishism|symbolic]] substitute for the [[mother]]'s [[lack|missing]] [[phallus]], the [[phobia|phobic]] [[object]] is an [[imaginary]] substitute for [[symbolic]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
==Preoedipal Triangle==<br />
Like all [[perversion]]s, [[fetishism]] is rooted in the [[preoedipal]] [[structure|triangle]] of [[mother]]-[[child]]-[[phallus]].<ref>{{S4}} p. 84-5, 194</ref><br />
<br />
However, it is unique in that it involves both [[identification]] with [[mother]] and with the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]]; indeed, in [[fetishism]], the [[subject]] oscillates between these two [[identification]]s.<ref>{{S4}} p. 86, 160</ref><br />
<br />
==Women==<br />
[[Lacan]]'s statement, in 1958, that the [[penis]] "takes on the value of a fetish" for heterosexual women raises a number of interesting questions.<ref>{{E}} p. 290</ref><br />
<br />
Firstly, it reverses [[Freud]]'s views on [[fetishism]]; rather than the [[fetishism|fetish]] being a [[symbolic]] substitute for the [[real]] [[penis]], the [[real]] [[penis]] may itself become a [[fetishism|fetish]] by substituting the [[woman]]'s [[absent]] [[symbolic]] [[phallus]]. <br />
<br />
Secondly, it undermines the claims (made by both [[Freud]] and [[Lacan]]) that [[fetishism]] is extremely rare among [[women]]; if the [[penis]] can be considered a [[fetishism|fetish]], then [[fetishism]] is clearly far more prevalent among [[women]] than among [[men]].<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
<blockquote>There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe but has to make do with the whole woman. (Kraus 2001: 13)</blockquote>Karl Kraus’s aphorism encapsulates a key element of the ''fetish'' – a disproportionate attachment to a particular ordering or structure of desire. The fetish can be viewed as a psychological version of the fi gure of speech known as synecdoche wherein a part is used to represent the whole. Excessive attachment to the part means that the fetishist “misses the bigger picture” – in Kraus’s example, obsessive longing for a shoe displaces appreciation of the whole woman. The standard understanding of the fetish has come to be dominated by connotations of sexual perversion (the fetishist needs rubber clothing, extreme pain or humiliation, etc.), but the concept of ''[[fetishistic disavowal]]'' allows a wider understanding of the concept that enables important insights into contemporary ideological processes – the political implications and consequences of which reach well beyond the merely sexual.<br />
<br />
Žižek frequently tells the story of a surprised visitor to the Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr who voiced disapproval when he saw a horse-shoe hanging above a door. Bohr replied: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!” For Žižek, the story illustrates a crucial, paradoxical element of the way in which belief works. Belief is not a simple unilinear thing; rather, it is an innately reflexive phenomenon – it is possible to believe in belief itself as opposed to the normally supposed need for there to be a content of belief. Th e seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal described the performative element of belief in relation to the Catholic Church with his injunction “Kneel down and you will believe!” but Žižek draws attention to the self-referential causality involved in such a performance: “Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!” (''PV'': 353).<br />
<br />
The importance of the concept of fetishistic disavowal thus resides in what it says about the ideological implications of such self-referentiality – the combined terms fetishistic disavowal stem from an excessive adherence to certain beliefs and practices and a simultaneous denial of any genuine belief. To explain how this concept works in practice, Žižek uses the example of Father Christmas and the way in which parents claim they promote the story only “for the sake of the children”. He argues that beyond the youngest and most naive infants, the majority of children know that Father Christmas does not exist. In reality, the only people who truly believe in Santa Claus are the parents themselves! They pretend to pretend to believe, that is, in the guise of acting like knowing adults performing for innocent children, what really occurs is that adults hide behind a purported fantasy so that they do not have to confront their defining need to believe in the existence of innocent and guileless children – self-deception in the service of innocence!<br />
<br />
Žižek’s theoretical insight regarding the notion of ''pretending to pretend to believe'' is that, whereas so-called “primitive” cultures develop working modes of symbolism/ideology embodied in social rituals and objects, if pushed, their members retain the ability to maintain a healthy sceptical distance towards those practices. Primitives act at a social level as if they believe, but at an individual level they may in fact demur. By contrast, “advanced” media consumers are part of a generally cynical zeitgeist but, as individuals, tend to act with uncritical belief. The split nature of this cynical disavowal-structure is encapsulated in the phrase “''je sais bien, mais quand même …''” (“I know very well, but even so …”), and is manifested in media formats that facilitate the deliberate overlooking of obvious ideological questions. For example, the internationally franchised TV series ''Secret Millionaire'' is premised upon the presence of a millionaire pretending to be a non-wealthy volunteer working among underprivileged people, and relies upon both the revelation of the initial secret and the maintenance of a much more substantive secret that the format encourages neither the participants nor the audience to ask, namely, what sort of society allows such wealth disparity to exist in the first place? In contrast to the primitive’s rational practice of irrationality through objects like the totem pole, ''Secret Millionaire''’s audience unwittingly disavows through a fetishized screen more irrational than any totem pole the true secret it is watching – the systematically ideological nature of the docudrama format.<br />
<br />
The movie ''Kung Fu Panda'' is for Žižek one of the purest representations of fetishistic disavowal. The film’s key message is that:<blockquote>“I know very well there is no special ingredient, but I nonetheless believe in it (and act accordingly)…” Cynical denunciation (at the level of rational knowledge) is counteracted by a call to “irrational” belief – and this is the most elementary formula of how ideology functions today. (“Hollywood Today”)</blockquote>Rather than merely a clever academic observation confined to the realm of cultural studies, the physical and hard-nosed economics of such cynical disavowal can be seen in Starbucks’ recent efforts to present elements of its franchise as independent, neighbourhood coffee shops:<blockquote>In a diversion from its usual mixture of stripped wood decor and bland artwork, Starbucks is opening a store in its home city of Seattle intended to capture the vibe of a beatnik coffee hangout – and disguise the fact that drinkers are in a Starbucks. Th e store will be called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea in an apparent attempt to mimic a local, independent coffee shop. A Starbucks spokeswoman says the place will have a “mercantile” look with open bins of coffee beans and manual grinding machines. Th ere will be live music and poetry performances. At least two other re-hashed outlets are on the way in Seattle as chairman Howard Schultz tries pushing Starbucks back towards its artsy roots. Steve Gotham, an analyst at marketing consultancy Allegra Strategies, thinks this is a smart move as customers look for differentiation among branded coffee houses: “The issue of localness and local relevance has some way to go – it’s a consumer trend more operators need to tap into.” (Clark 2009)</blockquote>Both the marketing consultants and the customers availing themselves of the neo-mercantile atmosphere of carefully culturally re-engineered shops know that genuine “localness” and “local relevance” cannot be corporately generated, but proceed as if it can – the profitable exploitation of ''je sais bien, mais quand même''.<br />
<br />
The archetypal examples of this kind of ideological operation are the notions of commodity fetishism and electronic/paper money. We pretend to believe that money made of paper/bytes is actually worth the physical goods we buy with it and that commodities have special non-physical properties. Thus, once again in a reversal of the primitive who publicly believes, but is privately cynical, although claiming that we do not really believe that brands are special, contemporary consumers nevertheless continue to routinely pay orders of magnitude above the material value of a T-shirt if it is adorned with a logo such as the Nike swoosh. Žižek’s key point is that conscious disavowal contradictorily co-exists with practical acts that embody belief.<br />
<br />
At the level of belief, key capitalist ideas – commodities are animate; capital has a quasi-natural status – are repudiated, but it is precisely the ironic distance from such notions that allows us to act as if they are true. The disavowal of the beliefs allows us to perform the actions. Ideology, then, depends upon the conviction that what “really matters” is what we are, rather than what we do, and that “what we are” is defined by an “inner essence” (Fisher 2006).<br />
<br />
Whereas the distance held towards his belief by the primitive is a conscious one, our disbelief is mediated by key capitalist mechanisms – the marketplace, the media – so that Kant’s subjectively objective (a reality interpreted by the subject) becomes the objectively subjective (the subject interpreted/interpellated by reality). “Although people may claim not to believe in the political system, their inert cynicism only validates that system … the idea that the way we behave in society is determined by objective market forces rather than subjective beliefs” (Thornhill 2009). Th is introduces a significant degree of ambiguity to Rachel Dawes’s words at the end of ''Batman Begins'': “Bruce … deep down you may still be that same great kid you used to be. But it’s not who you are underneath … it’s what you do that defines you.”<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Disavowal]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Imaginary]]<br />
* [[Lack]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Mother]]<br />
* [[Perversion]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Phallus]]<br />
* [[Phobia]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
* [[Woman]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]<br />
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Dictionary]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Imaginary]]<br />
[[Category:Symbolic]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
[[Category:Edit]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]<br />
{{OK}}<br />
<br />
__FORCETOC__</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fetish/Fetishistic_disavowal&diff=43773Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal2019-04-15T22:52:38Z<p>TheoryLeaks: /* In the work of Slavoj Žižek */</p>
<hr />
<div>{{Top}}fétichisme{{Bottom}} <br />
<br />
==Definition==<br />
The term "[[fetishism|fetish]]" first came into widespread use in the eighteenth century in the context of the study of "[[religion|primitive religions]]", in which it denoted an inanimate object of worship.<br />
<br />
In the nineteenth century, [[Marx]] borrowed the term to describe the way that, in capitalist societies, social relations assume the illusory form of relations between things ("[[commodity fetishism]]]").<br />
<br />
==Perversion==<br />
It was Krafft-Ebing who, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, first applied the term to [[sexuality|sexual behavior]].<br />
<br />
He defined [[fetishism]] as a [[perversion|sexual perversion]] in which [[enjoyment|sexual excitement]] is absolute dependent on the [[presence]] of a specific [[object]] (the [[fetishism|fetish]]).<br />
<br />
The [[fetishism|fetish]] is usually an inanimate [[object]] such as a shoe or piece of underwear.<br />
<br />
==Sigmund Freud==<br />
[[Freud]] argued that [[fetishism]] (seen as an almost exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]]) originates in the [[child]]'s horror of [[female]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
Confronted with the [[mother]]'s [[lack]] of a [[penis]], the [[fetishism|fetishist]] [[disavow]]s this [[lack]] and finds an [[object]] (the [[fetish]]) as a [[symbolic]] [[substitute]] for the mother's [[lack|missing]] [[penis]].<ref>{{F}}. "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Jacques Lacan==<br />
In [[Lacan]]'s first approach to the subject of [[fetishism]], in 1956, he argues that [[fetishism]] is a particularly important area of study and bemoans its neglect by his contemporaries. <br />
<br />
He stresses that the equivalence between the [[fetishism|fetish]] and the [[mother|maternal]] [[phallus]] can only be understood by reference to [[linguistic]] transformations, and not by reference to "vague analogies in the visual field" such as comparisons between fur and pubic hair."<ref>{{L}} "[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Variantes de la cure-type]]", in {{E}} [1956b]. p. 267)</ref><br />
<br />
He cites [[Freud]]'s [[analysis]] of the phrase "''Glanz auf der Nase''" as support for his argument.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Penis and Phallus==<br />
In the following years, as [[Lacan]] develops his distinction between the [[penis]] and [[phallus]], he emphasises that the [[fetishism|fetish]] is a substitute for the latter, not the former. <br />
<br />
==Disavowal==<br />
[[Lacan]] also extends the mechanism of [[disavowal]], making it the operation constitutive of [[perversion]] itself, and not just of the [[fetishism|fetishistic]] [[perversion]]. <br />
<br />
==Male Perversion==<br />
However, he retains [[Freud]]'s view that [[fetishism]] is an exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]],<ref>{{Ec}} p. 734</ref> or at least extremely rare among [[women]].<ref>{{S4}} p.154</ref><br />
<br />
==Phobic Object==<br />
In the [[seminar]] of 1956-7, [[Lacan]] elaborates an important distinction between the [[fetishism|fetish]] [[object]] and the [[phobic]] [[object]]; whereas the [[fetish]] is a [[fetishism|symbolic]] substitute for the [[mother]]'s [[lack|missing]] [[phallus]], the [[phobia|phobic]] [[object]] is an [[imaginary]] substitute for [[symbolic]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
==Preoedipal Triangle==<br />
Like all [[perversion]]s, [[fetishism]] is rooted in the [[preoedipal]] [[structure|triangle]] of [[mother]]-[[child]]-[[phallus]].<ref>{{S4}} p. 84-5, 194</ref><br />
<br />
However, it is unique in that it involves both [[identification]] with [[mother]] and with the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]]; indeed, in [[fetishism]], the [[subject]] oscillates between these two [[identification]]s.<ref>{{S4}} p. 86, 160</ref><br />
<br />
==Women==<br />
[[Lacan]]'s statement, in 1958, that the [[penis]] "takes on the value of a fetish" for heterosexual women raises a number of interesting questions.<ref>{{E}} p. 290</ref><br />
<br />
Firstly, it reverses [[Freud]]'s views on [[fetishism]]; rather than the [[fetishism|fetish]] being a [[symbolic]] substitute for the [[real]] [[penis]], the [[real]] [[penis]] may itself become a [[fetishism|fetish]] by substituting the [[woman]]'s [[absent]] [[symbolic]] [[phallus]]. <br />
<br />
Secondly, it undermines the claims (made by both [[Freud]] and [[Lacan]]) that [[fetishism]] is extremely rare among [[women]]; if the [[penis]] can be considered a [[fetishism|fetish]], then [[fetishism]] is clearly far more prevalent among [[women]] than among [[men]].<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
<blockquote>There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe but has to make do with the whole woman. (Kraus 2001: 13)</blockquote>Karl Kraus’s aphorism encapsulates a key element of the ''fetish'' – a disproportionate attachment to a particular ordering or structure of desire. The fetish can be viewed as a psychological version of the fi gure of speech known as synecdoche wherein a part is used to represent the whole. Excessive attachment to the part means that the fetishist “misses the bigger picture” – in Kraus’s example, obsessive longing for a shoe displaces appreciation of the whole woman. The standard understanding of the fetish has come to be dominated by connotations of sexual perversion (the fetishist needs rubber clothing, extreme pain or humiliation, etc.), but the concept of ''[[fetishistic disavowal]]'' allows a wider understanding of the concept that enables important insights into contemporary ideological processes – the political implications and consequences of which reach well beyond the merely sexual.<br />
<br />
Žižek frequently tells the story of a surprised visitor to the Danish nuclear physicist Niels Bohr who voiced disapproval when he saw a horse-shoe hanging above a door. Bohr replied: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!” For Žižek, the story illustrates a crucial, paradoxical element of the way in which belief works. Belief is not a simple unilinear thing; rather, it is an innately reflexive phenomenon – it is possible to believe in belief itself as opposed to the normally supposed need for there to be a content of belief. Th e seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal described the performative element of belief in relation to the Catholic Church with his injunction “Kneel down and you will believe!” but Žižek draws attention to the self-referential causality involved in such a performance: “Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!” (''PV'': 353).<br />
<br />
The importance of the concept of fetishistic disavowal thus resides in what it says about the ideological implications of such self-referentiality – the combined terms fetishistic disavowal stem from an excessive adherence to certain beliefs and practices and a simultaneous denial of any genuine belief. To explain how this concept works in practice, Žižek uses the example of Father Christmas and the way in which parents claim they promote the story only “for the sake of the children”. He argues that beyond the youngest and most naive infants, the majority of children know that Father Christmas does not exist. In reality, the only people who truly believe in Santa Claus are the parents themselves! They pretend to pretend to believe, that is, in the guise of acting like knowing adults performing for innocent children, what really occurs is that adults hide behind a purported fantasy so that they do not have to confront their defining need to believe in the existence of innocent and guileless children – self-deception in the service of innocence!<br />
<br />
Žižek’s theoretical insight regarding the notion of ''pretending to pretend to believe'' is that, whereas so-called “primitive” cultures develop working modes of symbolism/ideology embodied in social rituals and objects, if pushed, their members retain the ability to maintain a healthy sceptical distance towards those practices. Primitives act at a social level as if they believe, but at an individual level they may in fact demur. By contrast, “advanced” media consumers are part of a generally cynical zeitgeist but, as individuals, tend to act with uncritical belief. The split nature of this cynical disavowal-structure is encapsulated in the phrase “''je sais bien, mais quand même …''” (“I know very well, but even so …”), and is manifested in media formats that facilitate the deliberate overlooking of obvious ideological questions. For example, the internationally franchised TV series ''Secret Millionaire'' is premised upon the presence of a millionaire pretending to be a non-wealthy volunteer working among underprivileged people, and relies upon both the revelation of the initial secret and the maintenance of a much more substantive secret that the format encourages neither the participants nor the audience to ask, namely, what sort of society allows such wealth disparity to exist in the first place? In contrast to the primitive’s rational practice of irrationality through objects like the totem pole, ''Secret Millionaire''’s audience unwittingly disavows through a fetishized screen more irrational than any totem pole the true secret it is watching – the systematically ideological nature of the docudrama format.<br />
<br />
The movie ''Kung Fu Panda'' is for Žižek one of the purest representations of fetishistic disavowal. The film’s key message is that:<blockquote>“I know very well there is no special ingredient, but I nonetheless believe in it (and act accordingly)…” Cynical denunciation (at the level of rational knowledge) is counteracted by a call to “irrational” belief – and this is the most elementary formula of how ideology functions today. (“Hollywood Today”)</blockquote>Rather than merely a clever academic observation confined to the realm of cultural studies, the physical and hard-nosed economics of such cynical disavowal can be seen in Starbucks’ recent efforts to present elements of its franchise as independent, neighbourhood coffee shops:<blockquote>In a diversion from its usual mixture of stripped wood decor and bland artwork, Starbucks is opening a store in its home city of Seattle intended to capture the vibe of a beatnik coffee hangout – and disguise the fact that drinkers are in a Starbucks. Th e store will be called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea in an apparent attempt to mimic a local, independent coffee shop. A Starbucks spokeswoman says the place will have a “mercantile” look with open bins of coffee beans and manual grinding machines. Th ere will be live music and poetry performances. At least two other re-hashed outlets are on the way in Seattle as chairman Howard Schultz tries pushing Starbucks back towards its artsy roots. Steve Gotham, an analyst at marketing consultancy Allegra Strategies, thinks this is a smart move as customers look for differentiation among branded coffee houses: “The issue of localness and local relevance has some way to go – it’s a consumer trend more operators need to tap into.” (Clark 2009)</blockquote>Both the marketing consultants and the customers availing themselves of the neo-mercantile atmosphere of carefully culturally re-engineered shops know that genuine “localness” and “local relevance” cannot be corporately generated, but proceed as if it can – the profitable exploitation of ''je sais bien, mais quand même''.<br />
<br />
The archetypal examples of this kind of ideological operation are the notions of commodity fetishism and electronic/paper money. We pretend to believe that money made of paper/bytes is actually worth the physical goods we buy with it and that commodities have special non-physical properties. Thus, once again in a reversal of the primitive who publicly believes, but is privately cynical, although claiming that we do not really believe that brands are special, contemporary consumers nevertheless continue to routinely pay orders of magnitude above the material value of a T-shirt if it is adorned with a logo such as the Nike swoosh. Žižek’s key point is that conscious disavowal contradictorily co-exists with practical acts that embody belief.<br />
<br />
At the level of belief, key capitalist ideas – commodities are animate; capital has a quasi-natural status – are repudiated, but it is precisely the ironic distance from such notions that allows us to act as if they are true. The disavowal of the beliefs allows us to perform the actions. Ideology, then, depends upon the conviction that what “really matters” is what we are, rather than what we do, and that “what we are” is defined by an “inner essence” (Fisher 2006).<br />
<br />
Whereas the distance held towards his belief by the primitive is a conscious one, our disbelief is mediated by key capitalist mechanisms – the marketplace, the media – so that Kant’s subjectively objective (a reality interpreted by the subject) becomes the objectively subjective (the subject interpreted/interpellated by reality). “Although people may claim not to believe in the political system, their inert cynicism only validates that system … the idea that the way we behave in society is determined by objective market forces rather than subjective beliefs” (Thornhill 2009). Th is introduces a significant degree of ambiguity to Rachel Dawes’s words at the end of ''Batman Begins'': “Bruce … deep down you may still be that same great kid you used to be. But it’s not who you are underneath … it’s what you do that defines you.”<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Disavowal]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Imaginary]]<br />
* [[Lack]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Mother]]<br />
* [[Perversion]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Phallus]]<br />
* [[Phobia]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
* [[Woman]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]<br />
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Dictionary]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Imaginary]]<br />
[[Category:Symbolic]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
[[Category:Edit]]<br />
{{OK}}<br />
<br />
__FORCETOC__</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Talk:Fetish/Fetishistic_disavowal&diff=43771Talk:Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal2019-04-15T22:46:23Z<p>TheoryLeaks: TheoryLeaks moved page Talk:Fetishism to Talk:Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal</p>
<hr />
<div>==Dictionary==<br />
Fetishism first interested psychoanalysts as a sexual perversion, in the strict sense. The term referred to a man's compulsive use of an inherently nonsexual object as an essential condition for maintaining potency and achieving pleasure when having sexual relations with a person of the opposite sex. This view emphasizes that perversion, as originally understood, was viewed as a strictly masculine phenomenon. Freud presented his thinking on the subject in three texts, which represented his changing ideas on the subject: <i>Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality</i> (1905d), "Fetishism" (1927e), and "The Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defense" (1940e [1938]). The views expressed in those essays are as relevant in the early twenty-first century as when they were first written.<br />
In all observed cases, the fetish, in the fetishist's unconscious fantasy, is a substitute for a woman's "penis." It "completes" the woman by making her phallic. Consequently, the woman's genital organs lose any erogenous quality, in the eyes of the fetishist, erogeneity being completely transferred to the fetish. The fetish becomes the source of excitement, an idealized object capable of providing sexual pleasure to the fetishist.<br />
The psychopathological behavior of the fetishist can be considered exacerbation of a universal anxiety. Freud saw in this perversion one of the clearest demonstrations of the difficulty that some men (perhaps all men) experience in accepting the differences of the sexes.<br />
It has become clear that the most important factor behind this perversion is castration anxiety experienced to an extreme degree. Fetishism arises entirely from defensive measures unconsciously adopted to reject castration and eliminate it from the field of possibility. Only a part of the man believes that a woman does not have a penis. So as far as the fetishist is concerned, castration is still possible under these circumstances. But if both sexes are equipped with a penis, castration cannot occur in this world. It thus becomes essential to remedy this unacceptable reality by attributing a penis to the woman at any cost. Creating such a reality is the primary function of the fetish in the unconscious imagination of the fetishist. The fetishist must then shelter his fragile mental apparatus from the return of disturbing sexual perceptions. He does so by choosing as a fetish an object that is always available, like a high-heel shoe. One fetishist is quoted as saying, "Every time I am in the presence of a naked woman, I imagine a high-heel shoe; I couldn't tell what a vagina looks like." As Freud demonstrated, the fetish makes the woman "acceptable" as an object of sexual love.<br />
Freud considered fetishism important because this pathological structure can be used to observe the workings of two important defense mechanisms that had been partially ignored until then: splitting and denial. Fetishism enabled Freud clearly to identify the mechanism of splitting for the first time, that is, splitting of the thinking ego (to be distinguished from the splitting of the object representation). The fetishist demonstrates that he can accommodate two clearly contradictory conceptions of a woman within himself: a conscious affirmation ("The woman does not have a penis") and an unconscious fetishistic affirmation ("The woman has a penis"). The first is unimportant in the mental representations of the fetishist. These two modes of thought operate in parallel and have no effect on one another. The second mode of thought, a defense mechanism, denies castration, the lack of a penis, the crucial difference between the sexes. Most authors see splitting as arising to ensure the continuity of the denial, though it may be that splitting and continuity of denial occur simultaneously.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Since splitting and denial are observed in psychosis, some see fetishism as a protection against an otherwise threatening psychosis. Fetishism is also thought to protect against homosexuality. We should not conclude, however, that the fetishist is homosexual. In terms of his own feelings of identity and his own self-representations at all levels of thought, he sees himself as a man, a man in relation to a woman, except that the woman in this case also has a penis, according to the man's unconscious imagination. This is a major difference with the transvestite, who sees himself as a woman, in this case, a woman with a penis. Overall, in spite of the exceptions encountered, the transvestite is much closer to homosexuality than the fetishist. Rare cases of fetishism alternating with homosexuality have been observed, however.<br />
It follows from the above that fetishism is a sign of narcissistic pathology, with mental operations functioning at a very archaic level, primarily through the extensive use of primitive identification (which some authors refer to as "narcissistic identification" or "projective identification"). This assertion is based on the fact that by endowing the woman (the mother, in the unconscious) with a penis, the fetishist preserves his own sexual organ by identifying with the mother. In doing so, the fetishist exhibits considerable narcissistic vulnerability regarding the integrity of his physical image.<br />
Although opinions are divided, it seems justified to view the mechanism and structure of fetishism as resulting from a massive regression following the oedipal stage. The oedipal conflict was traumatic and results in significant regression to all levels of pregenitality, accompanied by strong anal and oral components. These components are manifest in an anxiety of disintegration, which is very noticeable during psychoanalysis. Another school of thought suggests viewing fetishism as essentially determined by pregenital conflicts.<br />
Psychoanalytic work in the 1990s has shown that the fetish can also take on, in most cases, several other functions in varying proportions. These secondary functions include protection against trauma and depression, release from the outward expression of hostility and contempt while expressing them secretly, relief from psychosomatic symptoms, control over separation anxiety. As a partial delusion, fetishism protects the subject from the delusion. And finally, fetishism provides access to the maternal breast and full possession of the idealized mother.<br />
<br />
<br />
"[[fetishism]]" ([[Fr]]. ''[[fétichisme]]'') <br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
The term "[[fetish]]" first came into widespread use in the eighteenth century in the context of the study of "[[religion|primitive religions," in which it denoted an inanimate object of worship.<br />
<br />
In the nineteenth century, [[Marx]] borrowed the term to describe the way that, in capitalist societies, social relations assume the illusory form of relations between things ("[[commodity fetishism]]]").<br />
<br />
It was Krafft-Ebing who, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, first applied the term to sexual behavior.<br />
<br />
He defined [[fetishism]] as a [[perversion|sexual perversion]] in which sexual excitement is absolute dependent on the presence of a specific [[object]] (the [[fetish]]).<br />
<br />
The [[fetish]] is usually an inanimate [[object]] such as a shoe or piece of underwear.<br />
<br />
---<br />
<br />
[[Freud]] argued that [[fetishism]] (seen as an almost exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]]) originates in the [[child]]'s horror of [[female]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
Confronted with the [[mother]]'s [[lack]] of a [[penis]], the [[fetishist]] [[disavow]]s this [[lack]] and finds an [[object]] (the [[fetish]]) as a [[symbolic]] [[substitute]] for the mother's [[lack|missing]] [[penis]].<ref>{{F}}. 1927e</ref><br />
<br />
--<br />
<br />
In [[Lacan]]'s first approach to the subject of [[fetishism]], in 1956, he argues that [[fetishism]] is a particularly important area of study and bemoans its neglect by his contemporaries. <br />
<br />
He stresses that the equivalence between the [[fetish]] and the [[mother|maternal]] [[phallus]] can only be understood by reference to linguistic transformations, and not by reference to "vague analogies in the visual field' such as comparisons between fur and pubic hair."<ref>{{L}} 1956b: 267)</ref><br />
<br />
He cites [[Freud]]'s [[analysis]] of the phrase "''Glanz auf der Nase''" as support for his argument.<ref>{{F}} 1927e.</ref><br />
<br />
In the following years, as [[Lacan]] develops his distinction between the [[penis]] and [[phallus]], he emphasises that the [[fetish]] is a substitute for the latter, not the former. <br />
<br />
[[Lacan]] also extends the mechanism of [[disavowal]], making it the operation constitutive of [[perversion]] itself, and not just of the [[fetishistic]] [[perversion]]. <br />
<br />
However, he retains [[Freud]]'s view that [[fetishism]] is an exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]],<ref>{{Ec}} 734</ref> or at least extremely rare among [[women]].<ref>{{S4}} p.154</ref><br />
<br />
In the [[seminar]] of 1956-7, [[Lacan]] elaborates an important distinction between the [[fetish]] [[object]] and the [[phobic]] [[object]]; whereas the [[fetish]] is a [[symbolic]] substitute for the [[mother]]'s [[lack|missing]] [[phallus]], the [[phobia|phobic]] [[object]] is an [[imaginary]] substitute for [[symbolic]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
Like all [[perversion]]s, [[fetishism]] is rooted in the [[preoedipal]] [[structure|triangle]] of [[mother]]-[[child]]-[[phallus]].<ref>{{S4}} p.84-5, 194</ref><br />
<br />
However, it is unique in that it involves both [[identification]] with [[mother]] and with the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]]; indeed, in [[fetishism]], the [[subject]] oscillates between these two [[identification]]s.<ref>{{S4}} p.86, 160</ref><br />
<br />
[[Lacan]]'s statement, in 1958, that the [[penis]] "takes on the value of a fetish" for heterosexual women raises a number of interesting questions.<ref>{{E}} p.290</ref><br />
<br />
Firstly, it reverses [[Freud]]'s views on [[fetishism]]; rather than the [[fetish]] being a [[symbolic]] substitute for the [[real]] [[penis]], the [[real]] [[penis]] may itself become a [[fetish]] by substituting the [[woman]]'s [[absent]] [[symbolic]] [[phallus]]. <br />
<br />
Secondly, it undermines the claims (made by both [[Freud]] and [[Lacan]]) that [[fetishism]] is extremely rare among [[women]]; if the [[penis]] can be considered a [[fetish]], then [[fetishism]] is clearly far more prevalent among [[women]] than among [[men]].<br />
<br />
== def ==<br />
The displacement of desire and fantasy onto alternative objects or body parts (eg. a foot fetish or a shoe fetish), in order to obviate a subject's confrontation with the castration complex. <br />
Freud came to realize in his essay on "Fetishism" that the fetishist is able at one and the same time to believe in his phantasy and to recognize that it is nothing but a phantasy. <br />
And yet, the fact of recognizing the phantasy as phantasy in no way reduces its power over the individual. <br />
Octave Mannoni, in an influential essay, phrased this paradoxical logic in this way: "je sais bien, mais quand-même" or "I know very well, but nevertheless." <br />
Zizek builds on this idea in theorizing the nature of ideology, which follows a similar contradictory logic. <br />
Kristeva goes so far as to associate all language with fetishism: "It is perhaps unavoidable that, when a subject confronts the factitiousness of object relation, when he stands at the place of the want that founds it, the fetish becomes a life preserver, temporary and slippery, but nonetheless indispensable. <br />
But is not exactly language our ultimate and inseparable fetish? <br />
And language, precisely, is based on fetishist denial ('I know that, but just the same,' 'the sign is not the thing, but just the same,' etc.) and defines us in our essence as speaking beings."<ref>37</ref><br />
<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
* [[Castration complex]]<br />
* [[Coprophilia]]<br />
* [[Disavowal]]<br />
* [[Phallic mother]]<br />
* [[Phallic woman]]<br />
* [[Psychotic defenses]]<br />
* [["Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence, The.]]<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references/><br />
# Freud, Sigmund. (1905d). Three essays on the theory of sexuality. SE, 7: 123-243.<br />
# ——. (1927e). Fetishism. SE, 21: 147-157.<br />
# ——. (1940e [1938]). Splitting of the ego in the process of defence. SE, 23: 271-278.<br />
<br />
[[Category:New]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Talk:Fetishism&diff=43772Talk:Fetishism2019-04-15T22:46:23Z<p>TheoryLeaks: TheoryLeaks moved page Talk:Fetishism to Talk:Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT [[Talk:Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fetish/Fetishistic_disavowal&diff=43769Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal2019-04-15T22:46:22Z<p>TheoryLeaks: TheoryLeaks moved page Fetishism to Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal</p>
<hr />
<div>{{Top}}fétichisme{{Bottom}} <br />
<br />
==Definition==<br />
The term "[[fetishism|fetish]]" first came into widespread use in the eighteenth century in the context of the study of "[[religion|primitive religions]]", in which it denoted an inanimate object of worship.<br />
<br />
In the nineteenth century, [[Marx]] borrowed the term to describe the way that, in capitalist societies, social relations assume the illusory form of relations between things ("[[commodity fetishism]]]").<br />
<br />
==Perversion==<br />
It was Krafft-Ebing who, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, first applied the term to [[sexuality|sexual behavior]].<br />
<br />
He defined [[fetishism]] as a [[perversion|sexual perversion]] in which [[enjoyment|sexual excitement]] is absolute dependent on the [[presence]] of a specific [[object]] (the [[fetishism|fetish]]).<br />
<br />
The [[fetishism|fetish]] is usually an inanimate [[object]] such as a shoe or piece of underwear.<br />
<br />
==Sigmund Freud==<br />
[[Freud]] argued that [[fetishism]] (seen as an almost exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]]) originates in the [[child]]'s horror of [[female]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
Confronted with the [[mother]]'s [[lack]] of a [[penis]], the [[fetishism|fetishist]] [[disavow]]s this [[lack]] and finds an [[object]] (the [[fetish]]) as a [[symbolic]] [[substitute]] for the mother's [[lack|missing]] [[penis]].<ref>{{F}}. "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Jacques Lacan==<br />
In [[Lacan]]'s first approach to the subject of [[fetishism]], in 1956, he argues that [[fetishism]] is a particularly important area of study and bemoans its neglect by his contemporaries. <br />
<br />
He stresses that the equivalence between the [[fetishism|fetish]] and the [[mother|maternal]] [[phallus]] can only be understood by reference to [[linguistic]] transformations, and not by reference to "vague analogies in the visual field" such as comparisons between fur and pubic hair."<ref>{{L}} "[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Variantes de la cure-type]]", in {{E}} [1956b]. p. 267)</ref><br />
<br />
He cites [[Freud]]'s [[analysis]] of the phrase "''Glanz auf der Nase''" as support for his argument.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Penis and Phallus==<br />
In the following years, as [[Lacan]] develops his distinction between the [[penis]] and [[phallus]], he emphasises that the [[fetishism|fetish]] is a substitute for the latter, not the former. <br />
<br />
==Disavowal==<br />
[[Lacan]] also extends the mechanism of [[disavowal]], making it the operation constitutive of [[perversion]] itself, and not just of the [[fetishism|fetishistic]] [[perversion]]. <br />
<br />
==Male Perversion==<br />
However, he retains [[Freud]]'s view that [[fetishism]] is an exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]],<ref>{{Ec}} p. 734</ref> or at least extremely rare among [[women]].<ref>{{S4}} p.154</ref><br />
<br />
==Phobic Object==<br />
In the [[seminar]] of 1956-7, [[Lacan]] elaborates an important distinction between the [[fetishism|fetish]] [[object]] and the [[phobic]] [[object]]; whereas the [[fetish]] is a [[fetishism|symbolic]] substitute for the [[mother]]'s [[lack|missing]] [[phallus]], the [[phobia|phobic]] [[object]] is an [[imaginary]] substitute for [[symbolic]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
==Preoedipal Triangle==<br />
Like all [[perversion]]s, [[fetishism]] is rooted in the [[preoedipal]] [[structure|triangle]] of [[mother]]-[[child]]-[[phallus]].<ref>{{S4}} p. 84-5, 194</ref><br />
<br />
However, it is unique in that it involves both [[identification]] with [[mother]] and with the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]]; indeed, in [[fetishism]], the [[subject]] oscillates between these two [[identification]]s.<ref>{{S4}} p. 86, 160</ref><br />
<br />
==Women==<br />
[[Lacan]]'s statement, in 1958, that the [[penis]] "takes on the value of a fetish" for heterosexual women raises a number of interesting questions.<ref>{{E}} p. 290</ref><br />
<br />
Firstly, it reverses [[Freud]]'s views on [[fetishism]]; rather than the [[fetishism|fetish]] being a [[symbolic]] substitute for the [[real]] [[penis]], the [[real]] [[penis]] may itself become a [[fetishism|fetish]] by substituting the [[woman]]'s [[absent]] [[symbolic]] [[phallus]]. <br />
<br />
Secondly, it undermines the claims (made by both [[Freud]] and [[Lacan]]) that [[fetishism]] is extremely rare among [[women]]; if the [[penis]] can be considered a [[fetishism|fetish]], then [[fetishism]] is clearly far more prevalent among [[women]] than among [[men]].<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
<blockquote>There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe but has to make do with the whole woman. (Kraus 2001: 13)</blockquote>Karl Kraus’s aphorism encapsulates a key element of the ''fetish'' – a disproportionate attachment to a particular ordering or structure of desire. The fetish can be viewed as a psychological version of the fi gure of speech known as synecdoche wherein a part is used to represent the whole. Excessive attachment to the part means that the fetishist “misses the bigger picture” – in Kraus’s example, obsessive longing for a shoe displaces appreciation of the whole woman. The standard understanding of the fetish has come to be dominated by connotations of sexual perversion (the fetishist needs rubber clothing, extreme pain or humiliation, etc.), but the concept of ''[[fetishistic disavowal]]'' allows a wider understanding of the concept that enables important insights into contemporary ideological processes – the political implications and consequences of which reach well beyond the merely sexual.<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Disavowal]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Imaginary]]<br />
* [[Lack]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Mother]]<br />
* [[Perversion]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Phallus]]<br />
* [[Phobia]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
* [[Woman]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]<br />
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Dictionary]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Imaginary]]<br />
[[Category:Symbolic]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
[[Category:Edit]]<br />
{{OK}}<br />
<br />
__FORCETOC__</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fetishism&diff=43770Fetishism2019-04-15T22:46:22Z<p>TheoryLeaks: TheoryLeaks moved page Fetishism to Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal</p>
<hr />
<div>#REDIRECT [[Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fetish/Fetishistic_disavowal&diff=43768Fetish/Fetishistic disavowal2019-04-15T22:46:01Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Top}}fétichisme{{Bottom}} <br />
<br />
==Definition==<br />
The term "[[fetishism|fetish]]" first came into widespread use in the eighteenth century in the context of the study of "[[religion|primitive religions]]", in which it denoted an inanimate object of worship.<br />
<br />
In the nineteenth century, [[Marx]] borrowed the term to describe the way that, in capitalist societies, social relations assume the illusory form of relations between things ("[[commodity fetishism]]]").<br />
<br />
==Perversion==<br />
It was Krafft-Ebing who, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, first applied the term to [[sexuality|sexual behavior]].<br />
<br />
He defined [[fetishism]] as a [[perversion|sexual perversion]] in which [[enjoyment|sexual excitement]] is absolute dependent on the [[presence]] of a specific [[object]] (the [[fetishism|fetish]]).<br />
<br />
The [[fetishism|fetish]] is usually an inanimate [[object]] such as a shoe or piece of underwear.<br />
<br />
==Sigmund Freud==<br />
[[Freud]] argued that [[fetishism]] (seen as an almost exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]]) originates in the [[child]]'s horror of [[female]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
Confronted with the [[mother]]'s [[lack]] of a [[penis]], the [[fetishism|fetishist]] [[disavow]]s this [[lack]] and finds an [[object]] (the [[fetish]]) as a [[symbolic]] [[substitute]] for the mother's [[lack|missing]] [[penis]].<ref>{{F}}. "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Jacques Lacan==<br />
In [[Lacan]]'s first approach to the subject of [[fetishism]], in 1956, he argues that [[fetishism]] is a particularly important area of study and bemoans its neglect by his contemporaries. <br />
<br />
He stresses that the equivalence between the [[fetishism|fetish]] and the [[mother|maternal]] [[phallus]] can only be understood by reference to [[linguistic]] transformations, and not by reference to "vague analogies in the visual field" such as comparisons between fur and pubic hair."<ref>{{L}} "[[Works of Jacques Lacan|Variantes de la cure-type]]", in {{E}} [1956b]. p. 267)</ref><br />
<br />
He cites [[Freud]]'s [[analysis]] of the phrase "''Glanz auf der Nase''" as support for his argument.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|Fetishism]]", 1927e. [[SE]] XXI, 149</ref><br />
<br />
==Penis and Phallus==<br />
In the following years, as [[Lacan]] develops his distinction between the [[penis]] and [[phallus]], he emphasises that the [[fetishism|fetish]] is a substitute for the latter, not the former. <br />
<br />
==Disavowal==<br />
[[Lacan]] also extends the mechanism of [[disavowal]], making it the operation constitutive of [[perversion]] itself, and not just of the [[fetishism|fetishistic]] [[perversion]]. <br />
<br />
==Male Perversion==<br />
However, he retains [[Freud]]'s view that [[fetishism]] is an exclusively [[male]] [[perversion]],<ref>{{Ec}} p. 734</ref> or at least extremely rare among [[women]].<ref>{{S4}} p.154</ref><br />
<br />
==Phobic Object==<br />
In the [[seminar]] of 1956-7, [[Lacan]] elaborates an important distinction between the [[fetishism|fetish]] [[object]] and the [[phobic]] [[object]]; whereas the [[fetish]] is a [[fetishism|symbolic]] substitute for the [[mother]]'s [[lack|missing]] [[phallus]], the [[phobia|phobic]] [[object]] is an [[imaginary]] substitute for [[symbolic]] [[castration]]. <br />
<br />
==Preoedipal Triangle==<br />
Like all [[perversion]]s, [[fetishism]] is rooted in the [[preoedipal]] [[structure|triangle]] of [[mother]]-[[child]]-[[phallus]].<ref>{{S4}} p. 84-5, 194</ref><br />
<br />
However, it is unique in that it involves both [[identification]] with [[mother]] and with the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]]; indeed, in [[fetishism]], the [[subject]] oscillates between these two [[identification]]s.<ref>{{S4}} p. 86, 160</ref><br />
<br />
==Women==<br />
[[Lacan]]'s statement, in 1958, that the [[penis]] "takes on the value of a fetish" for heterosexual women raises a number of interesting questions.<ref>{{E}} p. 290</ref><br />
<br />
Firstly, it reverses [[Freud]]'s views on [[fetishism]]; rather than the [[fetishism|fetish]] being a [[symbolic]] substitute for the [[real]] [[penis]], the [[real]] [[penis]] may itself become a [[fetishism|fetish]] by substituting the [[woman]]'s [[absent]] [[symbolic]] [[phallus]]. <br />
<br />
Secondly, it undermines the claims (made by both [[Freud]] and [[Lacan]]) that [[fetishism]] is extremely rare among [[women]]; if the [[penis]] can be considered a [[fetishism|fetish]], then [[fetishism]] is clearly far more prevalent among [[women]] than among [[men]].<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
<blockquote>There is no unhappier creature under the sun than a fetishist who longs for a woman’s shoe but has to make do with the whole woman. (Kraus 2001: 13)</blockquote>Karl Kraus’s aphorism encapsulates a key element of the ''fetish'' – a disproportionate attachment to a particular ordering or structure of desire. The fetish can be viewed as a psychological version of the fi gure of speech known as synecdoche wherein a part is used to represent the whole. Excessive attachment to the part means that the fetishist “misses the bigger picture” – in Kraus’s example, obsessive longing for a shoe displaces appreciation of the whole woman. The standard understanding of the fetish has come to be dominated by connotations of sexual perversion (the fetishist needs rubber clothing, extreme pain or humiliation, etc.), but the concept of ''[[fetishistic disavowal]]'' allows a wider understanding of the concept that enables important insights into contemporary ideological processes – the political implications and consequences of which reach well beyond the merely sexual.<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Disavowal]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Imaginary]]<br />
* [[Lack]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Mother]]<br />
* [[Perversion]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Phallus]]<br />
* [[Phobia]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
* [[Woman]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]<br />
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Dictionary]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Imaginary]]<br />
[[Category:Symbolic]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
[[Category:Edit]]<br />
{{OK}}<br />
<br />
__FORCETOC__</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fantasy&diff=43767Fantasy2019-04-15T22:44:02Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Top}}fantasme{{Bottom}}<br />
<br />
==Sigmund Freud==<br />
The concept of [[fantasy]] is central to [[Freud]]'s [[Works of Sigmund Freud|work]].<ref>"[[Fantasy]]" is spelt "[[fantasy|phantasy]]" in the ''[[Standard Edition]]''.</ref> Indeed, the origin of [[psychoanalysis]] is bound up with [[Freud]]'s recognition in 1897 that [[memory|memories]] of [[seduction]] are sometimes the product of [[fantasy]] rather than traces of real sexual abuse. This crucial moment in the development of [[Freud]]'s thought (which is often simplistically dubbed "the abandonment of the seduction theory") seems to imply that [[fantasy]] is opposed to [[reality]], a purely illusory product of the imagination which stands in the way of a correct perception of reality. However, such a view of [[fantasy]] cannot be maintained in [[psychoanalytic theory]], since [[reality]] is not seen as an unproblematic given in which there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which is itself discursively constructed.<br />
<br />
Therefore the change in [[Freud]]'s ideas in 1897 does not imply a rejection of the fundamentally discursive and imaginative nature of [[memory]]; [[memory|memories]] of past events are continually being reshaped in accordance with [[unconscious]] [[desire]]s, so much so that [[symptom]]s originate not in any supposed "objective facts" but in a complex [[dialectic]] in which [[fantasy]] plays a vital role.<br />
<br />
[[Freud]] uses the term "[[fantasy]]", then, to denote a [[scene]] which is presented to the imagination and which stages an [[unconscious]] [[desire]]. The [[subject]] invariably plays a part in this [[scene]], even when this is not immediately apparent. The [[fantasy|fantasized]] [[scene]] may be [[conscious]] or [[unconscious]]. When [[unconscious]], the [[analyst]] must reconstruct it on the basis of other clues.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|A Child Is Being Beaten]]," 1919e. [[SE]] XVII, 177.</ref><br />
<br />
==Jacques Lacan==<br />
===Protection Function===<br />
While [[Lacan]] accepts [[Freud]]'s formulations on the importance of [[fantasy]] and on its visual quality as a scenario which stages [[desire]], he emphasizes the protective function of [[fantasy]]. [[Lacan]] compares the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to a frozen [[image]] on a cinema screen; just as the film may be stopped at a certain point in order to avoid showing a [[trauma]]tic [[scene]] which follows, so also the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] is a [[defence]] which veils [[castration]].<ref>{{S4}} pp. 119-120</ref> The [[fantasy]] is thus characterized by a fixed and immobile quality.<br />
<br />
===Defence and Clinical Structure===<br />
Although "[[fantasy]]" only emerges as a significant term in [[Lacan]]'s work from 1957 on, the concept of a relatively stable mode of [[defence]] is evident earlier on. This concept is at the root both of [[Lacan]]'s idea of [[fantasy]] and his notion of [[clinical structure]]; both are conceived of as a relatively stable way of defending oneself against [[castration]], against the [[lack]] in the [[Other]]. Each [[clinical structure]] may thus be distinguished by the particular way in which it uses a [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to veil the [[lack]] in the [[Other]].<br />
<br />
===Neurotic Fantasy===<br />
The [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], which [[Lacan]] formalizes in the [[matheme]] ('''$ <> a'''), appears in the [[graph of desire]] as the [[subject]]'s response to the enigmatic [[desire]] of the [[Other]], a way of answering the question about what the [[Other]] wants from me. (''[[Che vuoi?]]'')<ref>{{E}} p. 313</ref><br />
The [[matheme]] is to be read: the [[bar]]red [[subject]] in relation to the [[object]]. The [[perverse]] [[fantasy]] inverts this relation to the [[object]], and is thus formalized as '''''a'' <> $'''.<ref>{{Ec}} p. 774</ref><br />
<br />
===Fantasy of the Hysteric and Obsessional Neurotic===<br />
Although the [[matheme]] ('''S <> a''') designates the general [[structure]] of the [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], [[Lacan]] also provides more specific formulas for the [[fantasy]] of the [[hysteric]] and that of the [[obsessional neurotic]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 295</ref> While the various formulas of [[fantasy]] indicate the common features of the [[fantasy|fantasies]] of those who share the same [[clinical structure]], the [[analyst]] must also attend to the unique features which characterise each [[patient]]'s particular fantasmatic scenario.<br />
<br />
===Fantasy and the Subject===<br />
These unique features express the [[subject]]'s particular mode of ''[[jouissance]]'' though in a distorted way. The distortion evident in the [[fantasy]] marks it as a compromise formation; the [[fantasy]] is thus both that which enables the [[subject]] to sustain his [[desire]],<ref>{{S11}} p. 185; {{Ec}} p. 780</ref> and "that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref><br />
<br />
===Fundamental Fantasy===<br />
[[Lacan]] holds that beyond all the myriad images which appear in [[dream]]s and elsewhere there is always one "[[fantasy|fundamental fantasy]]" which is [[unconscious]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 127</ref> In the course of [[psychoanalytic treatment]], the [[analyst]] reconstructs the [[analysand]]'s [[fantasy]] in all its details. However, the [[treatment]] does not stop there; the analysand must go on to "[[fantasy|traverse the fundamental fantasy]]."<ref>{{S11}} p. 273</ref> In other words, the [[treatment]] must produce some modification of the [[subject]]'s fundamental mode of [[defence]], some alteration in his mode of ''[[jouissance]]''.<br />
<br />
===Image and Symbolic Structure===<br />
Although [[Lacan]] recognizes the power of the [[image]] in [[fantasy]], he insists that this is due not to any intrinsic quality of the [[image]] in itself but to the place which it occupies in a [[symbolic]] [[structure]]; the [[fantasy]] is always "an image set to work in a signifying structure."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref> <br />
<!--<br />
===Kleinian Account of Fantasy===<br />
[[Lacan]] criticizes the [[Klein]]ian account of [[fantasy]] for not taking this [[symbolic]] [[structure]] fully into account, and thus remaining at the level of the [[imaginary]]; "any attempt to reduce [fantasy] to the imagination . . . is a permanent misconception."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref> In the 1960s, [[Lacan]] devotes a whole year of his [[seminar]] to discussing what he calls "the logic of fantasy," again stressing the importance of the [[signification|signifying]] [[structure]] in [[fantasy]].<ref>{{S14}}</ref><br />
--><br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Like many of Žižek’s foundational theories, fantasy derives from the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan. For Freud, fantasy emerged in his 1897 discovery that memories of seduction may be the result of fantasy as opposed to actual sexual violence. In common parlance, fantasy denotes a separation from reality, a construction that is fictional and therefore opposed to reality. Freud’s discovery, though, challenges this widespread understanding. For psychoanalysis, reality is problematic when it is assumed that it distinguishes authentic or unmediated experience for the subject. Reality is more properly understood as a way of perceiving that is already stained by the human subject’s desire. Therefore, reality is already a subjective process mediated by desire and constructed discursively. Fantasy, then, acts as a scene that stages desire in the imagination of the subject. For this reason, Lacan states in his fourteenth seminar, ''The Logic of Fantasy'': “Desire is the essence of reality” (''S''XIV: 6). The principal point for Lacan, here, is that fantasy is the setting for desire where fantasy provides the matrix through which subjects begin to desire.<br />
<br />
For Žižek, fantasy is not an exercise in fulfilment, contentment or satisfaction. Instead, it provides a scene for a privileged yet arbitrary object that embodies the force of desire. The foundational premise of fantasy in this rendering lies in the claim that desire is not something that is given; rather, it is assembled. Therefore, fantasy acts as a structure that provides the coordinates for a subject’s desire. That is, fantasy provides the idea of a privileged object that desire fixates on in order to provide the subject with its position in relation to it. This privileged object acts as the ''[[objet petit a]]'' or object-cause of desire. This object structures the subject’s experience of the world in so far as this object is taken as more than its material property. The object that consumes desire and therefore occupies the fantasy of the subject must first fall prey to the illusion that it is more than its pragmatic material. The object is marked by this structure as being more than its materiality, as being endowed with the promise to satisfy the desire that necessitates it. Thus, fantasy acts as the mode whereby the subject learns to desire because through fantasy the subject is situated as desiring.<br />
<br />
The role fantasy plays is twofold: universal and particular. Fantasy is a universal structure that indexes, points or directs our desire towards a physical manifestation that occupies desire. Yet, what is particular to each and every subject is the way fantasy structures the relation to the trauma of lack predicated by desire. This constitutive lack that the privileged object promises to fulfil acts as a screen that orients each fantasy, which in turn supports desire in order to shield the subject from the trauma of lack itself. In this way, fantasy bestows reality with a fictional coherence and consistency that appears to fulfil the lack that constitutes social reality. Hence, Žižek’s foremost contribution to this long-theorized notion lies in showing how fantasy serves as a political structure. He reveals how fantasy can fill in ideological gaps and provide access to obscene ''[[jouissance]]'', and he contends that a failure to explicate the essence of political beliefs does not imply any failure in the hold these beliefs have over us. Instead, political ideologies serve to give subjects a means of envisioning the world in which such a failure emerges as evidence as to how transcendent is their particular ideology. Fantasy serves politics precisely in that each political group must recognize its point of view as manifested in the extrapolitical fantasy objects customary within that specific nation, culture or religion. If not, these groups must displace the sitting ideologies’ fantasy objects with their chosen manifestations. Consequently, for Žižek, fantasy goes beyond the usual symbolic coordinates, so that traversing the fantasy does not mean getting rid of the fantasy but being even more taken up by it.<br />
<br />
Fantasy, therefore, acts as a way for the subject to envisage a way out of the dissatisfaction produced by the demands of social reality through these objects or ideas (e.g. freedom, brotherhood, the Church). In this sense, fantasy is a psychological structure that manifests itself in a phenomenological form. And, while fantasy might not provide us with the object itself, it can provide something of equal consequence: the scene of attaining the privileged object that renders attainment as a possibility. Fantasy organizes and domesticates the ''jouissance'' that provides the framework through which we experience reality; therefore, this structure – and the arbitrary object that animates it – acts as a defence against the traumatic loss of ''jouissance'' that occurs through entering the symbolic order. In turn, fantasy can surface in a more evident socio-symbolic way in which it assuages unrest by depoliticizing the social body for the purposes of accepting a ruling ideology. Fantasy thus serves as a way to distract, even encourage, the social body from directly engaging with the dissatisfaction of lack. Although lack is constitutive of every human subject, the political advocacy of a social body can help organize a society better to manage dissatisfaction as a by-product of the demands of that social reality. Therefore, fantasy acts as a way to fracture political unity by focusing attention on individual satisfaction imagined to be the promise of a unique privileged object.<br />
<br />
Because fantasy offers the promise of satisfaction as part of a privileged object, we understand this object as being apart from our self. Enjoyment derived from this fantasy image is therefore projected onto the Other. As a path to repress the idea of a non-lacking subject, the subject we fantasize and therefore imagine as a possibility, we project onto the Other the enjoyment we lack. Žižek argues that this places the subject in a position of understanding the Other obtaining enjoyment at our expense. Because we are able to fantasize an impossible enjoyment, we also misattribute this impossibility to an Other that seems to enjoy in a way we cannot experience but only imagine. Since fantasy provides us with the coordinates to domesticate our desire, in order to fulfil lack we rarely attribute lack as an experience beyond our self. The distinction between our own lack of impossible enjoyment and the non-lacking status of the Other opens the possibility of a violence predicated on destroying the enjoyment we fantasize this Other to possess at our expense. The logic of fantasy in relation to lack suggests that, if I am lacking, it is because some other nefarious figure has stolen it, and thus the lack of lack, as it were, becomes an object of possession under capitalism. This rendering is consistent with Žižek’s assertion that fantasy leads to all varieties of discrimination: racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia, among others. Th is non-lacking status takes the form of a person or thing we understand through cultural myth or capitalist ideology.<br />
<br />
Consequently, fantasy offers us the illusion that the object we pursue will assuage the discomfort of lack. In this formulation, desire is separated from drive because it privileges the object of our fantasy that presents itself as the cure for lack. Desire, in this case, predicates its function on the attainment of the object of our fantasies, while drive reaches satisfaction through the continual pursuit of this object. That is, drive functions through the repetition of this cycle whereas desire places faith in the redeeming quality of the object. The privileged object of our desire and the fantasy that supports it act in two ways: (a) as the site where the human subject invests in the hope for an enjoyment (''jouissance'') that will return the subject to a non-lacking state, which allows each human subject to tolerate this status; and (b) as a fantasmatic, and thus arbitrary, promise of a non-lacking status that does not exist, which replaces a partial and obtainable enjoyment by holding out the idea of a total enjoyment that it ultimately cannot produce or guarantee. Desire constantly moves forwards from object to object because each new instantiation of our fantasy fails to provide the satisfaction the human subject believes it will provide. In this sense, fantasy remains the same, but our desire forces us to continue the search for the impossible owing to the inherent failure each object represents. Because the subject does not lack an experiential object, lack is misattributed as a negative category that can be overcome by addition.<br />
<br />
The subject lacks, but what it lacks is nothing and each new object fails to satisfy because it can only offer something.<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Hysteria]]<br />
* [[Image]]<br />
||<br />
* ''[[Jouissance]]''<br />
* [[Lack]]<br />
* [[Matheme]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Neurosis]]<br />
* [[Obsessional neurosis]]<br />
* [[Structure]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Subject]]<br />
* [[Treatment]]<br />
* [[Unconscious]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<div style="font-size:11px" class="references-small"><br />
<references /><br />
</div><br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]<br />
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Dictionary]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]<br />
{{OK}}<br />
__FORCETOC__</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fantasy&diff=43766Fantasy2019-04-15T22:43:35Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>{{Top}}fantasme{{Bottom}}<br />
<br />
==Sigmund Freud==<br />
The concept of [[fantasy]] is central to [[Freud]]'s [[Works of Sigmund Freud|work]].<ref>"[[Fantasy]]" is spelt "[[fantasy|phantasy]]" in the ''[[Standard Edition]]''.</ref> Indeed, the origin of [[psychoanalysis]] is bound up with [[Freud]]'s recognition in 1897 that [[memory|memories]] of [[seduction]] are sometimes the product of [[fantasy]] rather than traces of real sexual abuse. This crucial moment in the development of [[Freud]]'s thought (which is often simplistically dubbed "the abandonment of the seduction theory") seems to imply that [[fantasy]] is opposed to [[reality]], a purely illusory product of the imagination which stands in the way of a correct perception of reality. However, such a view of [[fantasy]] cannot be maintained in [[psychoanalytic theory]], since [[reality]] is not seen as an unproblematic given in which there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which is itself discursively constructed.<br />
<br />
Therefore the change in [[Freud]]'s ideas in 1897 does not imply a rejection of the fundamentally discursive and imaginative nature of [[memory]]; [[memory|memories]] of past events are continually being reshaped in accordance with [[unconscious]] [[desire]]s, so much so that [[symptom]]s originate not in any supposed "objective facts" but in a complex [[dialectic]] in which [[fantasy]] plays a vital role.<br />
<br />
[[Freud]] uses the term "[[fantasy]]", then, to denote a [[scene]] which is presented to the imagination and which stages an [[unconscious]] [[desire]]. The [[subject]] invariably plays a part in this [[scene]], even when this is not immediately apparent. The [[fantasy|fantasized]] [[scene]] may be [[conscious]] or [[unconscious]]. When [[unconscious]], the [[analyst]] must reconstruct it on the basis of other clues.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|A Child Is Being Beaten]]," 1919e. [[SE]] XVII, 177.</ref><br />
<br />
==Jacques Lacan==<br />
===Protection Function===<br />
While [[Lacan]] accepts [[Freud]]'s formulations on the importance of [[fantasy]] and on its visual quality as a scenario which stages [[desire]], he emphasizes the protective function of [[fantasy]]. [[Lacan]] compares the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to a frozen [[image]] on a cinema screen; just as the film may be stopped at a certain point in order to avoid showing a [[trauma]]tic [[scene]] which follows, so also the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] is a [[defence]] which veils [[castration]].<ref>{{S4}} pp. 119-120</ref> The [[fantasy]] is thus characterized by a fixed and immobile quality.<br />
<br />
===Defence and Clinical Structure===<br />
Although "[[fantasy]]" only emerges as a significant term in [[Lacan]]'s work from 1957 on, the concept of a relatively stable mode of [[defence]] is evident earlier on. This concept is at the root both of [[Lacan]]'s idea of [[fantasy]] and his notion of [[clinical structure]]; both are conceived of as a relatively stable way of defending oneself against [[castration]], against the [[lack]] in the [[Other]]. Each [[clinical structure]] may thus be distinguished by the particular way in which it uses a [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to veil the [[lack]] in the [[Other]].<br />
<br />
===Neurotic Fantasy===<br />
The [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], which [[Lacan]] formalizes in the [[matheme]] ('''$ <> a'''), appears in the [[graph of desire]] as the [[subject]]'s response to the enigmatic [[desire]] of the [[Other]], a way of answering the question about what the [[Other]] wants from me. (''[[Che vuoi?]]'')<ref>{{E}} p. 313</ref><br />
The [[matheme]] is to be read: the [[bar]]red [[subject]] in relation to the [[object]]. The [[perverse]] [[fantasy]] inverts this relation to the [[object]], and is thus formalized as '''''a'' <> $'''.<ref>{{Ec}} p. 774</ref><br />
<br />
===Fantasy of the Hysteric and Obsessional Neurotic===<br />
Although the [[matheme]] ('''S <> a''') designates the general [[structure]] of the [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], [[Lacan]] also provides more specific formulas for the [[fantasy]] of the [[hysteric]] and that of the [[obsessional neurotic]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 295</ref> While the various formulas of [[fantasy]] indicate the common features of the [[fantasy|fantasies]] of those who share the same [[clinical structure]], the [[analyst]] must also attend to the unique features which characterise each [[patient]]'s particular fantasmatic scenario.<br />
<br />
===Fantasy and the Subject===<br />
These unique features express the [[subject]]'s particular mode of ''[[jouissance]]'' though in a distorted way. The distortion evident in the [[fantasy]] marks it as a compromise formation; the [[fantasy]] is thus both that which enables the [[subject]] to sustain his [[desire]],<ref>{{S11}} p. 185; {{Ec}} p. 780</ref> and "that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref><br />
<br />
===Fundamental Fantasy===<br />
[[Lacan]] holds that beyond all the myriad images which appear in [[dream]]s and elsewhere there is always one "[[fantasy|fundamental fantasy]]" which is [[unconscious]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 127</ref> In the course of [[psychoanalytic treatment]], the [[analyst]] reconstructs the [[analysand]]'s [[fantasy]] in all its details. However, the [[treatment]] does not stop there; the analysand must go on to "[[fantasy|traverse the fundamental fantasy]]."<ref>{{S11}} p. 273</ref> In other words, the [[treatment]] must produce some modification of the [[subject]]'s fundamental mode of [[defence]], some alteration in his mode of ''[[jouissance]]''.<br />
<br />
===Image and Symbolic Structure===<br />
Although [[Lacan]] recognizes the power of the [[image]] in [[fantasy]], he insists that this is due not to any intrinsic quality of the [[image]] in itself but to the place which it occupies in a [[symbolic]] [[structure]]; the [[fantasy]] is always "an image set to work in a signifying structure."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref> <br />
<!--<br />
===Kleinian Account of Fantasy===<br />
[[Lacan]] criticizes the [[Klein]]ian account of [[fantasy]] for not taking this [[symbolic]] [[structure]] fully into account, and thus remaining at the level of the [[imaginary]]; "any attempt to reduce [fantasy] to the imagination . . . is a permanent misconception."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref> In the 1960s, [[Lacan]] devotes a whole year of his [[seminar]] to discussing what he calls "the logic of fantasy," again stressing the importance of the [[signification|signifying]] [[structure]] in [[fantasy]].<ref>{{S14}}</ref><br />
--><br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Like many of Žižek’s foundational theories, fantasy derives from the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan. For Freud, fantasy emerged in his 1897 discovery that memories of seduction may be the result of fantasy as opposed to actual sexual violence. In common parlance, fantasy denotes a separation from reality, a construction that is fictional and therefore opposed to reality. Freud’s discovery, though, challenges this widespread understanding. For psychoanalysis, reality is problematic when it is assumed that it distinguishes authentic or unmediated experience for the subject. Reality is more properly understood as a way of perceiving that is already stained by the human subject’s desire. Therefore, reality is already a subjective process mediated by desire and constructed discursively. Fantasy, then, acts as a scene that stages desire in the imagination of the subject. For this reason, Lacan states in his fourteenth seminar, ''The Logic of Fantasy'': “Desire is the essence of reality” (''S''XIV: 6). The principal point for Lacan, here, is that fantasy is the setting for desire where fantasy provides the matrix through which subjects begin to desire.<br />
<br />
For Žižek, fantasy is not an exercise in fulfilment, contentment or satisfaction. Instead, it provides a scene for a privileged yet arbitrary object that embodies the force of desire. The foundational premise of fantasy in this rendering lies in the claim that desire is not something that is given; rather, it is assembled. Therefore, fantasy acts as a structure that provides the coordinates for a subject’s desire. That is, fantasy provides the idea of a privileged object that desire fixates on in order to provide the subject with its position in relation to it. This privileged object acts as the ''[[objet petit a]]'' or object-cause of desire. This object structures the subject’s experience of the world in so far as this object is taken as more than its material property. The object that consumes desire and therefore occupies the fantasy of the subject must first fall prey to the illusion that it is more than its pragmatic material. The object is marked by this structure as being more than its materiality, as being endowed with the promise to satisfy the desire that necessitates it. Thus, fantasy acts as the mode whereby the subject learns to desire because through fantasy the subject is situated as desiring.<br />
<br />
The role fantasy plays is twofold: universal and particular. Fantasy is a universal structure that indexes, points or directs our desire towards a physical manifestation that occupies desire. Yet, what is particular to each and every subject is the way fantasy structures the relation to the trauma of lack predicated by desire. This constitutive lack that the privileged object promises to fulfil acts as a screen that orients each fantasy, which in turn supports desire in order to shield the subject from the trauma of lack itself. In this way, fantasy bestows reality with a fictional coherence and consistency that appears to fulfil the lack that constitutes social reality. Hence, Žižek’s foremost contribution to this long-theorized notion lies in showing how fantasy serves as a political structure. He reveals how fantasy can fill in ideological gaps and provide access to obscene ''[[jouissance]]'', and he contends that a failure to explicate the essence of political beliefs does not imply any failure in the hold these beliefs have over us. Instead, political ideologies serve to give subjects a means of envisioning the world in which such a failure emerges as evidence as to how transcendent is their particular ideology. Fantasy serves politics precisely in that each political group must recognize its point of view as manifested in the extrapolitical fantasy objects customary within that specific nation, culture or religion. If not, these groups must displace the sitting ideologies’ fantasy objects with their chosen manifestations. Consequently, for Žižek, fantasy goes beyond the usual symbolic coordinates, so that traversing the fantasy does not mean getting rid of the fantasy but being even more taken up by it.<br />
<br />
Fantasy, therefore, acts as a way for the subject to envisage a way out of the dissatisfaction produced by the demands of social reality through these objects or ideas (e.g. freedom, brotherhood, the Church). In this sense, fantasy is a psychological structure that manifests itself in a phenomenological form. And, while fantasy might not provide us with the object itself, it can provide something of equal consequence: the scene of attaining the privileged object that renders attainment as a possibility. Fantasy organizes and domesticates the ''jouissance'' that provides the framework through which we experience reality; therefore, this structure – and the arbitrary object that animates it – acts as a defence against the traumatic loss of ''jouissance'' that occurs through entering the symbolic order. In turn, fantasy can surface in a more evident socio-symbolic way in which it assuages unrest by depoliticizing the social body for the purposes of accepting a ruling ideology. Fantasy thus serves as a way to distract, even encourage, the social body from directly engaging with the dissatisfaction of lack. Although lack is constitutive of every human subject, the political advocacy of a social body can help organize a society better to manage dissatisfaction as a by-product of the demands of that social reality. Therefore, fantasy acts as a way to fracture political unity by focusing attention on individual satisfaction imagined to be the promise of a unique privileged object.<br />
<br />
Because fantasy offers the promise of satisfaction as part of a privileged object, we understand this object as being apart from our self. Enjoyment derived from this fantasy image is therefore projected onto the Other. As a path to repress the idea of a non-lacking subject, the subject we fantasize and therefore imagine as a possibility, we project onto the Other the enjoyment we lack. Žižek argues that this places the subject in a position of understanding the Other obtaining enjoyment at our expense. Because we are able to fantasize an impossible enjoyment, we also misattribute this impossibility to an Other that seems to enjoy in a way we cannot experience but only imagine. Since fantasy provides us with the coordinates to domesticate our desire, in order to fulfil lack we rarely attribute lack as an experience beyond our self. The distinction between our own lack of impossible enjoyment and the non-lacking status of the Other opens the possibility of a violence predicated on destroying the enjoyment we fantasize this Other to possess at our expense. The logic of fantasy in relation to lack suggests that, if I am lacking, it is because some other nefarious figure has stolen it, and thus the lack of lack, as it were, becomes an object of possession under capitalism. This rendering is consistent with Žižek’s assertion that fantasy leads to all varieties of discrimination: racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia, among others. Th is non-lacking status takes the form of a person or thing we understand through cultural myth or capitalist ideology.<br />
<br />
Consequently, fantasy offers us the illusion that the object we pursue will assuage the discomfort of lack. In this formulation, desire is separated from drive because it privileges the object of our fantasy that presents itself as the cure for lack. Desire, in this case, predicates its function on the attainment of the object of our fantasies, while drive reaches satisfaction through the continual pursuit of this object. That is, drive functions through the repetition of this cycle whereas desire places faith in the redeeming quality of the object. The privileged object of our desire and the fantasy that supports it act in two ways: (a) as the site where the human subject invests in the hope for an enjoyment (''jouissance'') that will return the subject to a non-lacking state, which allows each human subject to tolerate this status; and (b) as a fantasmatic, and thus arbitrary, promise of a non-lacking status that does not exist, which replaces a partial and obtainable enjoyment by holding out the idea of a total enjoyment that it ultimately cannot produce or guarantee. Desire constantly moves forwards from object to object because each new instantiation of our fantasy fails to provide the satisfaction the human subject believes it will provide. In this sense, fantasy remains the same, but our desire forces us to continue the search for the impossible owing to the inherent failure each object represents. Because the subject does not lack an experiential object, lack is misattributed as a negative category that can be overcome by addition.<br />
<br />
The subject lacks, but what it lacks is nothing and each new object fails to satisfy because it can only off er something.<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Hysteria]]<br />
* [[Image]]<br />
||<br />
* ''[[Jouissance]]''<br />
* [[Lack]]<br />
* [[Matheme]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Neurosis]]<br />
* [[Obsessional neurosis]]<br />
* [[Structure]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Subject]]<br />
* [[Treatment]]<br />
* [[Unconscious]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<div style="font-size:11px" class="references-small"><br />
<references /><br />
</div><br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]<br />
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Dictionary]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]<br />
{{OK}}<br />
__FORCETOC__</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Fantasy&diff=43765Fantasy2019-04-15T22:43:08Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>{{Top}}fantasme{{Bottom}}<br />
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==Sigmund Freud==<br />
The concept of [[fantasy]] is central to [[Freud]]'s [[Works of Sigmund Freud|work]].<ref>"[[Fantasy]]" is spelt "[[fantasy|phantasy]]" in the ''[[Standard Edition]]''.</ref> Indeed, the origin of [[psychoanalysis]] is bound up with [[Freud]]'s recognition in 1897 that [[memory|memories]] of [[seduction]] are sometimes the product of [[fantasy]] rather than traces of real sexual abuse. This crucial moment in the development of [[Freud]]'s thought (which is often simplistically dubbed "the abandonment of the seduction theory") seems to imply that [[fantasy]] is opposed to [[reality]], a purely illusory product of the imagination which stands in the way of a correct perception of reality. However, such a view of [[fantasy]] cannot be maintained in [[psychoanalytic theory]], since [[reality]] is not seen as an unproblematic given in which there is a single objectively correct way of perceiving, but as something which is itself discursively constructed.<br />
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Therefore the change in [[Freud]]'s ideas in 1897 does not imply a rejection of the fundamentally discursive and imaginative nature of [[memory]]; [[memory|memories]] of past events are continually being reshaped in accordance with [[unconscious]] [[desire]]s, so much so that [[symptom]]s originate not in any supposed "objective facts" but in a complex [[dialectic]] in which [[fantasy]] plays a vital role.<br />
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[[Freud]] uses the term "[[fantasy]]", then, to denote a [[scene]] which is presented to the imagination and which stages an [[unconscious]] [[desire]]. The [[subject]] invariably plays a part in this [[scene]], even when this is not immediately apparent. The [[fantasy|fantasized]] [[scene]] may be [[conscious]] or [[unconscious]]. When [[unconscious]], the [[analyst]] must reconstruct it on the basis of other clues.<ref>{{F}} "[[Works of Sigmund Freud|A Child Is Being Beaten]]," 1919e. [[SE]] XVII, 177.</ref><br />
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==Jacques Lacan==<br />
===Protection Function===<br />
While [[Lacan]] accepts [[Freud]]'s formulations on the importance of [[fantasy]] and on its visual quality as a scenario which stages [[desire]], he emphasizes the protective function of [[fantasy]]. [[Lacan]] compares the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to a frozen [[image]] on a cinema screen; just as the film may be stopped at a certain point in order to avoid showing a [[trauma]]tic [[scene]] which follows, so also the [[fantasy]] [[scene]] is a [[defence]] which veils [[castration]].<ref>{{S4}} pp. 119-120</ref> The [[fantasy]] is thus characterized by a fixed and immobile quality.<br />
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===Defence and Clinical Structure===<br />
Although "[[fantasy]]" only emerges as a significant term in [[Lacan]]'s work from 1957 on, the concept of a relatively stable mode of [[defence]] is evident earlier on. This concept is at the root both of [[Lacan]]'s idea of [[fantasy]] and his notion of [[clinical structure]]; both are conceived of as a relatively stable way of defending oneself against [[castration]], against the [[lack]] in the [[Other]]. Each [[clinical structure]] may thus be distinguished by the particular way in which it uses a [[fantasy]] [[scene]] to veil the [[lack]] in the [[Other]].<br />
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===Neurotic Fantasy===<br />
The [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], which [[Lacan]] formalizes in the [[matheme]] ('''$ <> a'''), appears in the [[graph of desire]] as the [[subject]]'s response to the enigmatic [[desire]] of the [[Other]], a way of answering the question about what the [[Other]] wants from me. (''[[Che vuoi?]]'')<ref>{{E}} p. 313</ref><br />
The [[matheme]] is to be read: the [[bar]]red [[subject]] in relation to the [[object]]. The [[perverse]] [[fantasy]] inverts this relation to the [[object]], and is thus formalized as '''''a'' <> $'''.<ref>{{Ec}} p. 774</ref><br />
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===Fantasy of the Hysteric and Obsessional Neurotic===<br />
Although the [[matheme]] ('''S <> a''') designates the general [[structure]] of the [[neurotic]] [[fantasy]], [[Lacan]] also provides more specific formulas for the [[fantasy]] of the [[hysteric]] and that of the [[obsessional neurotic]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 295</ref> While the various formulas of [[fantasy]] indicate the common features of the [[fantasy|fantasies]] of those who share the same [[clinical structure]], the [[analyst]] must also attend to the unique features which characterise each [[patient]]'s particular fantasmatic scenario.<br />
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===Fantasy and the Subject===<br />
These unique features express the [[subject]]'s particular mode of ''[[jouissance]]'' though in a distorted way. The distortion evident in the [[fantasy]] marks it as a compromise formation; the [[fantasy]] is thus both that which enables the [[subject]] to sustain his [[desire]],<ref>{{S11}} p. 185; {{Ec}} p. 780</ref> and "that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref><br />
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===Fundamental Fantasy===<br />
[[Lacan]] holds that beyond all the myriad images which appear in [[dream]]s and elsewhere there is always one "[[fantasy|fundamental fantasy]]" which is [[unconscious]].<ref>{{S8}} p. 127</ref> In the course of [[psychoanalytic treatment]], the [[analyst]] reconstructs the [[analysand]]'s [[fantasy]] in all its details. However, the [[treatment]] does not stop there; the analysand must go on to "[[fantasy|traverse the fundamental fantasy]]."<ref>{{S11}} p. 273</ref> In other words, the [[treatment]] must produce some modification of the [[subject]]'s fundamental mode of [[defence]], some alteration in his mode of ''[[jouissance]]''.<br />
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===Image and Symbolic Structure===<br />
Although [[Lacan]] recognizes the power of the [[image]] in [[fantasy]], he insists that this is due not to any intrinsic quality of the [[image]] in itself but to the place which it occupies in a [[symbolic]] [[structure]]; the [[fantasy]] is always "an image set to work in a signifying structure."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref> <br />
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===Kleinian Account of Fantasy===<br />
[[Lacan]] criticizes the [[Klein]]ian account of [[fantasy]] for not taking this [[symbolic]] [[structure]] fully into account, and thus remaining at the level of the [[imaginary]]; "any attempt to reduce [fantasy] to the imagination . . . is a permanent misconception."<ref>{{E}} p. 272</ref> In the 1960s, [[Lacan]] devotes a whole year of his [[seminar]] to discussing what he calls "the logic of fantasy," again stressing the importance of the [[signification|signifying]] [[structure]] in [[fantasy]].<ref>{{S14}}</ref><br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Like many of Žižek’s foundational theories, fantasy derives from the psychoanalytic work of Freud and Lacan. For Freud, fantasy emerged in his 1897 discovery that memories of seduction may be the result of fantasy as opposed to actual sexual violence. In common parlance, fantasy denotes a separation from reality, a construction that is fictional and therefore opposed to reality. Freud’s discovery, though, challenges this widespread understanding. For psychoanalysis, reality is problematic when it is assumed that it distinguishes authentic or unmediated experience for the subject. Reality is more properly understood as a way of perceiving that is already stained by the human subject’s desire. Therefore, reality is already a subjective process mediated by desire and constructed discursively. Fantasy, then, acts as a scene that stages desire in the imagination of the subject. For this reason, Lacan states in his fourteenth seminar, ''The Logic of Fantasy'': “Desire is the essence of reality” (''S''XIV: 6). The principal point for Lacan, here, is that fantasy is the setting for desire where fantasy provides the matrix through which subjects begin to desire.<br />
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For Žižek, fantasy is not an exercise in fulfilment, contentment or satisfaction. Instead, it provides a scene for a privileged yet arbitrary object that embodies the force of desire. The foundational premise of fantasy in this rendering lies in the claim that desire is not something that is given; rather, it is assembled. Therefore, fantasy acts as a structure that provides the coordinates for a subject’s desire. That is, fantasy provides the idea of a privileged object that desire fixates on in order to provide the subject with its position in relation to it. This privileged object acts as the ''[[objet petit a]]'' or object-cause of desire. This object structures the subject’s experience of the world in so far as this object is taken as more than its material property. The object that consumes desire and therefore occupies the fantasy of the subject must first fall prey to the illusion that it is more than its pragmatic material. The object is marked by this structure as being more than its materiality, as being endowed with the promise to satisfy the desire that necessitates it. Thus, fantasy acts as the mode whereby the subject learns to desire because through fantasy the subject is situated as desiring.<br />
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The role fantasy plays is twofold: universal and particular. Fantasy is a universal structure that indexes, points or directs our desire towards a physical manifestation that occupies desire. Yet, what is particular to each and every subject is the way fantasy structures the relation to the trauma of lack predicated by desire. This constitutive lack that the privileged object promises to fulfil acts as a screen that orients each fantasy, which in turn supports desire in order to shield the subject from the trauma of lack itself. In this way, fantasy bestows reality with a fictional coherence and consistency that appears to fulfil the lack that constitutes social reality. Hence, Žižek’s foremost contribution to this long-theorized notion lies in showing how fantasy serves as a political structure. He reveals how fantasy can fill in ideological gaps and provide access to obscene ''[[jouissance]]'', and he contends that a failure to explicate the essence of political beliefs does not imply any failure in the hold these beliefs have over us. Instead, political ideologies serve to give subjects a means of envisioning the world in which such a failure emerges as evidence as to how transcendent is their particular ideology. Fantasy serves politics precisely in that each political group must recognize its point of view as manifested in the extrapolitical fantasy objects customary within that specific nation, culture or religion. If not, these groups must displace the sitting ideologies’ fantasy objects with their chosen manifestations. Consequently, for Žižek, fantasy goes beyond the usual symbolic coordinates, so that traversing the fantasy does not mean getting rid of the fantasy but being even more taken up by it.<br />
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Fantasy, therefore, acts as a way for the subject to envisage a way out of the dissatisfaction produced by the demands of social reality through these objects or ideas (e.g. freedom, brotherhood, the Church). In this sense, fantasy is a psychological structure that manifests itself in a phenomenological form. And, while fantasy might not provide us with the object itself, it can provide something of equal consequence: the scene of attaining the privileged object that renders attainment as a possibility. Fantasy organizes and domesticates the ''jouissance'' that provides the framework through which we experience reality; therefore, this structure – and the arbitrary object that animates it – acts as a defence against the traumatic loss of ''jouissance'' that occurs through entering the symbolic order. In turn, fantasy can surface in a more evident socio-symbolic way in which it assuages unrest by depoliticizing the social body for the purposes of accepting a ruling ideology. Fantasy thus serves as a way to distract, even encourage, the social body from directly engaging with the dissatisfaction of lack. Although lack is constitutive of every human subject, the political advocacy of a social body can help organize a society better to manage dissatisfaction as a by-product of the demands of that social reality. Therefore, fantasy acts as a way to fracture political unity by focusing attention on individual satisfaction imagined to be the promise of a unique privileged object.<br />
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Because fantasy offers the promise of satisfaction as part of a privileged object, we understand this object as being apart from our self. Enjoyment derived from this fantasy image is therefore projected onto the Other. As a path to repress the idea of a non-lacking subject, the subject we fantasize and therefore imagine as a possibility, we project onto the Other the enjoyment we lack. Žižek argues that this places the subject in a position of understanding the Other obtaining enjoyment at our expense. Because we are able to fantasize an impossible enjoyment, we also misattribute this impossibility to an Other that seems to enjoy in a way we cannot experience but only imagine. Since fantasy provides us with the coordinates to domesticate our desire, in order to fulfil lack we rarely attribute lack as an experience beyond our self. The distinction between our own lack of impossible enjoyment and the non-lacking status of the Other opens the possibility of a violence predicated on destroying the enjoyment we fantasize this Other to possess at our expense. The logic of fantasy in relation to lack suggests that, if I am lacking, it is because some other nefarious figure has stolen it, and thus the lack of lack, as it were, becomes an object of possession under capitalism. This rendering is consistent with Žižek’s assertion that fantasy leads to all varieties of discrimination: racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia, among others. Th is non-lacking status takes the form of a person or thing we understand through cultural myth or capitalist ideology.<br />
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Consequently, fantasy offers us the illusion that the object we pursue will assuage the discomfort of lack. In this formulation, desire is separated from drive because it privileges the object of our fantasy that presents itself as the cure for lack. Desire, in this case, predicates its function on the attainment of the object of our fantasies, while drive reaches satisfaction through the continual pursuit of this object. That is, drive functions through the repetition of this cycle whereas desire places faith in the redeeming quality of the object. The privileged object of our desire and the fantasy that supports it act in two ways: (a) as the site where the human subject invests in the hope for an enjoyment (''jouissance'') that will return the subject to a non-lacking state, which allows each human subject to tolerate this status; and (b) as a fantasmatic, and thus arbitrary, promise of a non-lacking status that does not exist, which replaces a partial and obtainable enjoyment by holding out the idea of a total enjoyment that it ultimately cannot produce or guarantee. Desire constantly moves forwards from object to object because each new instantiation of our fantasy fails to provide the satisfaction the human subject believes it will provide. In this sense, fantasy remains the same, but our desire forces us to continue the search for the impossible owing to the inherent failure each object represents. Because the subject does not lack an experiential object, lack is misattributed as a negative category that can be overcome by addition.<br />
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The subject lacks, but what it lacks is nothing and each new object fails to satisfy because it can only off er something.<br />
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==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Hysteria]]<br />
* [[Image]]<br />
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* ''[[Jouissance]]''<br />
* [[Lack]]<br />
* [[Matheme]]<br />
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* [[Neurosis]]<br />
* [[Obsessional neurosis]]<br />
* [[Structure]]<br />
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* [[Subject]]<br />
* [[Treatment]]<br />
* [[Unconscious]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
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==References==<br />
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[[Category:Psychoanalysis]]<br />
[[Category:Jacques Lacan]]<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Dictionary]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Terms]]<br />
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__FORCETOC__</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Ren%C3%A9_Descartes&diff=43764René Descartes2019-04-15T02:16:48Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>'''René Descartes''' (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–1649) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. He is generally considered one of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age.<br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Slavoj Žižek’s most extensive engagement with René Descartes occurs in ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology]]'', where Descartes’ meditations upon the cogito, that unknown thing that thinks, serve to launch Žižek’s explorations of the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' that orients the Lacanian subject of desire. Žižek returns to remap the uncertain cartography of the Cartesian cogito in [[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|''The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology'']], a book that “focuses on the reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity” (''TS'': vii). In both texts, Žižek’s interest in Descartes is quickly subsumed by his entanglement with a host of Descartes’ successors, most eminent among them [[Immanuel Kant]]. [[Jacques Lacan]], of course, was more heavily invested in Kant than Descartes. Indeed, as Žižek himself insists in his introduction to ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Lacan offers a fourth “critique of pure desire” (''TN'': 3) to supplement Kant’s tripartite critical philosophy. In what follows, I will provide a brief gloss of Kant’s critique of Cartesian idealism, in order to set the stage for Žižek’s post-Lacanian reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity. My remarks will focus on ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', for this book contains Žižek’s most extensive engagement with Descartes, and also, in its later chapters, foreshadows the absent centre of political ontology that haunts ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]''.<br />
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Descartes’ aim in his ''[[Meditations on First Philosophy]]'' (1641) is to refute scepticism by overturning his unexamined beliefs in order to determine whether anything survives such a sweeping upheaval. His formulation of the basic problem of metaphysics is epistemological, and it reads: given the ontological chasm between mind and matter, how can we have certain knowledge of the material existence of anything at all? He concludes that we cannot, and thus follows that fundamental axiom of his: that the only certainty we may have is that, in so far as I think, “I am, I exist” (Descartes 2003: 25). What then is this “thinking thing” so defined by Descartes? His measured response: “A thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, does not will, and which also imagines and senses” (ibid.: 26). The Cartesian ''[[cogito]]'' is not to be equated with the machinery of the limbs, or with the vital principle that animates the body, nor is it reducible to the pineal gland ligature between the two; finally, it is not identifiable with the self-consistency of the ego as it fixes its gaze and arranges its look in the mirror. Rather, the ''cogito'' may be analysed by turning the mind away from the senses and towards the ''[[a priori]]'' conditions of thought, but it cannot be objectively “known”, sensibly “pictured” or even properly “imagined”. This explains the philosopher’s astonishment that what is most certain to him, the ''cogito'', is least known by him, and that what is most known by him, the sensible universe, is least certain of all.<br />
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Kant’s critique of Descartes is concentrated in his “Fourth Paralogism: Of Ideality” in his ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' (1781/1787). He argues there that Descartes is at once an empirical idealist and a transcendental realist. Descartes’ transcendental realism resides in his mistakenly positing an absolute reality of things-in-themselves that exists independent of thought. This leads to an erroneous empirical idealism that undermines the certainty of outward appearances. The transcendental illusion that plagues Cartesian idealism gives rise to an epistemological error that consists in mistaking the problematic concept of a noumenal reality of things-in-themselves for an actual or transcendently real object domain that exists independent of thought. By way of contrast, Kant claims that his own critical philosophy couples transcendental idealism with empirical realism. The empirical realist does not posit a transcendent reality of things-in-themselves outside of appearances, but instead considers the material universe to be nothing more than appearances for our phenomenal understanding. Accordingly, the reality of appearances cannot be doubted in relation to some [[Noumenon|noumenal]] order of things as they really are, for reality, at least as we know it, really is restricted to the domain of appearances. Therefore, it follows that the reality of external appearances is no less certain than the internal reality of the cogito. Kant does not actually argue against such a noumenal order of things-in-themselves, but instead contends that whether such a noumenal reality exists independently of appearances is really no business of reason at all. More importantly, the proper business of rational philosophy consists in taking cognisance of the business that is in fact proper to it, which in this case means acknowledging the material reality of appearances and the transcendental ideality of the same.<br />
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Žižek begins the first chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', “I or He or It (the Thing) Which Thinks”, by returning to the locus of this debate between Descartes and Kant concerning the ontological status of the ''cogito''. For Kant, the ''cogito'' is equated with the “I think” of transcendental apperception, and thus serves as the condition of possibility for all experience. But Kant resists the Cartesian manoeuvre of “hypostasizing” this transcendental function of the imagination into a noumenal thing. This is because, for Kant, such a substantializing manoeuvre moves beyond the realm of appearances to posit a substantial entity (call it the cogito, the soul or the ego) that exists outside of its transcendental functionality within the field of experience. Žižek aligns Lacan with Kant against Descartes, and he does so by making reference to Lacan’s formula of fantasy, which reads: “‘I think’ only insofar as I am inaccessible to myself qua noumenal Thing which thinks” (''TN'': 14). Stated otherwise, the subject of thought is only in so far as it is inaccessible to itself as the “Thing which thinks”. In fact, the lack of intuited content for the “I think” is constitutive of transcendental apperception in its formal resiliency to phenomenal comprehension, which explains the title for the first part of Žižek’s book, “The Cogito: The Void Called Subject”. What Lacan adds to this debate is that the fantastic itinerary of the subject of desire is to heal the wound introduced by the advent of the signifier, and by doing so, somehow to reclaim or fill the void that lies at its extimate centre. Th e “Thing which thinks” is thus the condition of possibility for all of my experience, but it is at the same time inaccessible to me as an agent of desire, and this very lack of being constitutes me as the subject that I am.<br />
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According to Žižek’s Lacanian appropriation of Kant’s transcendental reformulation of the Cartesian ''cogito'', the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' occupies the structural gap in the symbolic matrix of desire. The ''objet petit a'' accordingly takes on an ambivalent resonance: on the one hand, it is the hard kernel of the Real that resists symbolization; on the other hand, it is nothing more than a fantasy of plenitude that is engendered by the void introduced by symbolization. Or, rather, it is both at one and the same time: it thus serves as a transcendental object that holds the place of lack, but only when this lack engenders the illusion of a plenitude that desire forever falls short of or fails to achieve. A leitmotif of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'' is that limitation precedes transcendence, at least from the dialectical (Hegelian) point of view of the Lacanian subject. Žižek accordingly writes that the main point of Lacan’s reading of Kant is that “the distinction between phenomena and the Thing can be sustained only within the space of desire as structured by the intervention of the signifier” (''TN'': 37). Thus, every object that is destined to fill the place of the lack in the subject is only another hallucinatory wish fulfilment, the first in the sublime and sublimated series of which the first is nothing other than the “thinking thing” secured by Descartes’ doubtful meditations, a cogitative role model Kant was only too quick to replicate, whether as a transcendental function of apperception or as the spontaneous agent of freedom. Indeed, in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek endorses [[Martin Heidegger]]’s criticisms of Kant, for in this later book Žižek reads Kant as belonging to the same tradition of modern subjectivity initiated by Descartes. Ultimately, Žižek will find that Heidegger followed Kant’s lead and abandoned the question of being, for his post-Kehre focus on the piety of thought and the dignity of the thinking being suggests that he too “recoiled” from the abyss of the transcendental imagination.<br />
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I would like to conclude by gesturing towards how Žižek’s criticism of the Cartesian ''cogito'' feeds into his analysis of the complicity between [[radical evil]] and [[nationalism]]. In “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!”, the final chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Žižek claims that nationalism is a privileged form of radical evil. For Kant, radical evil consists in elevating sensuous or particular maxims (e.g. of self, wealth, ethnicity, religion, class and nation) over the universal law of reason. The fanatical nationalist presumes to have made phenomenal contact with the Good, and then proceeds to elevate this phenomenal object to the dignity of the Thing. Of course, from Žižek’s Lacanian perspective, limitation precedes transcendence, and thus the nationalist’s presumption to know the Good (in the form of the nation) is the epistemological equivalent to the pre-Cartesian philosopher’s presumption to know the Soul. Following Kant, Žižek is able to denounce this as a radically evil act of nationalist mystification. Yet, the question remains, does not the Lacanian settlement of the problem of finitude amount to the same hypostatization of the subject of doubt, only this time in the form of the barred or inaccessible subject of desire? In other words, does he not substitute an illusory object of his own in the place hollowed out by the Real – call it the cogito, the Thing that thinks, the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' or, indeed, the nation? Given Hegel’s profound mediation in Žižek’s Cartesian itinerary, if limitation precedes transcendence, then the obverse or Hegelian side of this injunction is that transcendence precedes limitation, which is one way of reading Žižek’s prescription for the absent centre of political ontology. The psychoanalytic cure consists in traversing the fantasy to its limit, and thus in revealing the void called subject that lies at its extimate centre. Žižek repeats Kant’s critical turn by following Lacan’s trajectory from a theoretical unveiling of the subject of desire to an ethical praxis that remains haunted by the spectre of the Cartesian cogito.<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Jouissance&diff=43763Jouissance2019-04-15T02:09:37Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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{| align="right" style="line-height:2.0em;text-align:right;background-color:#fcfcfc;border:1px solid #aaa" <br />
| [[English]]: ''[[enjoyment]]''<br />
|}<br />
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==Translation==<br />
===Enjoyment===<br />
''[[Jouissance]]'', and the corresponding verb, ''[[jouir]]'', refer to an extreme [[pleasure]]. It is not possible to translate this French word, ''jouissance'', precisely. Sometimes it is translated as '[[enjoyment]]', but enjoyment has a reference to pleasure, and ''jouissance'' is an enjoyment that always has a deadly reference, a paradoxical pleasure, reaching an almost intolerable level of excitation. Due to the specificity of the French term, it is usually left untranslated.<br />
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<!-- There is no adequate translation in [[English]] of the word ''[[jouissance]]''.<ref>It is therefore left untranslated in most English editions of [[Lacan]].</ref> "[[Enjoyment]]" does convey the sense, contained in ''[[jouissance]]'', of ''enjoyment of rights'', of ''property'', etc., but it lacks the ''sexual connotations'' of the [[French]] word. (''Jouir'' is slang for "to come".) --><br />
<!-- But it also refers to those moments when too much pleasure is pain. --><br />
<!-- The term signifies the ecstatic or orgasmic [[enjoyment]] - and exquisite [[pain]] - of something or someone. In [[French]], ''[[jouissance]]'' includes the [[enjoyment]] of rights and property, but also the slang verb, ''[[jouissance|jouir]]'', to come, and so is related to the [[pleasure]] of the [[sexual relationship|sexual act]].--> <br />
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===Pleasure===<br />
<!-- Lacan develops this opposition in 1960, in the context of his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. --><br />
<!-- In 1960 [[Lacan]] develops an opposition --><br />
[[Lacan]] makes an important distinction between ''[[jouissance]]'' and ''[[plaisir]]'' ([[pleasure]]). [[Pleasure]] obeys the [[law]] of homeostasis that [[Freud]] evokes in ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'', whereby, through discharge, the [[psyche]] seeks the lowest possible level of tension. The [[pleasure principle]] thus functions as a limit imposed on [[enjoyment]]; it commands the [[subject]] to "enjoy as little as possible." ''[[Jouissance]]'' transgresses this [[law]] and, in that respect, it is ''beyond'' the [[pleasure principle]].<br />
<!-- ''[[Jouissance]]'' goes beyond ''[[plaisir]]''. --><br />
<!-- However, the result of transgressing the [[pleasure principle]] is not more [[pleasure]], but pain, since there is only a certain amount of [[pleasure]] that the [[subject]] can bear. Beyond this limit, [[pleasure]] becomes [[pain]], and this "painful pleasure" is what [[Lacan]] calls ''[[jouissance]]''. "''Jouissance'' is suffering."<ref>{{S7}} p. 184</ref> The term ''[[jouissance]]'' thus nicely expresses the paradoxical [[satisfaction]] that the [[subject]] derives from his [[symptom]], or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his on [[satisfaction]]. --><br />
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<!-- ==Masochism== There is an important difference between [[masochism]] and [[jouissance]]. In [[masochism]], [[pain]] is a means to [[pleasure]]; [[pleasure]] is taken in the very fact of [[pain|suffering]] itself, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish [[pleasure]] from [[pain]]. With ''[[jouissance]]'', on the other hand, [[pleasure]] and [[pain]] remain distinct; no [[pleasure]] is taken in the [[pain]] itself, but the [[pleasure]] cannot be obtained without paying the price of [[pain|suffering]]. It is thus a kind of ''deal'' in which "[[pleasure]] ''and'' [[pain]] are presented as a single packet."<ref>Seminar of 27 February 1963. J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. p. 189.</ref> --><br />
<br />
<!-- <blockquote>"Castration means that ''jouissance'' must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (''l'échelle renversée'') of the Law of desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 324</ref></blockquote> --><br />
The [[symbolic]] [[prohibition]] of [[enjoyment]] in the [[Oedipus complex]] (the [[incest]] [[taboo]]) is thus, paradoxically, the [[prohibition]] of something which is already impossible; its function is therefore to sustain the [[neurotic]] [[illusion]] that [[enjoyment]] would be attainable if it were not forbidden. The very prohibition creates the [[desire]] to transgress it, and ''[[jouissance]]'' is therefore fundamentally transgressive.<ref>{{S7}} Ch. 15</ref><br />
<br />
==Development==<br />
===Sigmund Freud===<br />
=====Death Drive=====<br />
The [[death drive]] is the name given to that constant [[desire]] in the [[subject]] to break through the [[pleasure principle]] towards the [[Thing]] and a certain [[surplus|excess]] ''[[jouissance]]''; thus ''[[jouissance]]'' is "the path towards death".<ref>{{S17}} p. 17</ref><br />
<br />
Insofar as the [[drive]]s are attempts to break through the [[pleasure principle]] in search of ''[[jouissance]]'', every [[drive]] is a [[death drive]].<br />
<br />
===Jacques Lacan===<br />
====1953 - 1960====<br />
=====Master-Slave Dialectic=====<br />
''Jouissance'' is not a central preoccupation during the first part of<br />
Lacan's teaching. ''Jouissance'' appears in Lacan's work in the [[seminars]] of [[Seminar I|1953-54]] and [[Seminar II|1954-55]], and is referred to in some other works (''[[Écrits]]'', 1977). In these early years ''[[jouissance]]'' is not elaborated in any [[structure|structural sense]], the reference being mainly to [[Hegel]] and the [[master—slave]] [[dialectic]], where the [[slave]] must facilitate the [[master]]'s ''jouissance'' through his work in producing objects for the master.<br />
<br />
=====Sexual Reference=====<br />
From 1957 the sexual reference of ''jouissance'' as orgasm emerges into the foreground. This is the more popular use of the term ''jouissance'', with ''jouir'' meaning `to come'.<br />
<br />
=====''The Ethics of Psychoanalysis''=====<br />
In his [[seminar]] of [[Seminar VII|1959-60]], [[Seminar VII|The Ethics of Psychoanalysis]], Lacan deals for the first time with the [[Real]] and ''jouissance''. Although the [[Real]] of the 1960s is not the same as his use of the Real in the 1980s, the first concepts emerge in this seminar. Here ''jouissance'' is considered in its function of [[evil]], that which is ascribed to a neighbour, but which dwells in the most intimate part of the [[subject]], [[extimate|intimate]] and [[alienated]] at the same time, as it is that from which the [[subject]] flees, experiencing [[aggression]] at the very approach of an encounter with his/her own ''jouissance''. The chapters in this seminar address such concepts as the ''jouissance'' of [[transgression]] and the paradox of ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
====1960s====<br />
=====Symbolic Castration=====<br />
It is in the text '[[The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious]]' that a [[structure|structural]] account of ''jouissance'' is first given in connection with the [[subject]]'s entry into the [[symbolic]] (Lacan, 1977).<br />
<br />
The [[speaking]] [[being]] has to use the [[signifier]], which comes from the [[Other]]. This has an effect of cutting any notion of a complete ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. The [[signifier]] forbids the ''jouissance'' of the [[body]] of the Other. Complete ''jouissance'' is thus [[forbidden]] to the one who speaks, that is, to all speaking beings. This refers to a loss of ''jouissance'' which is a necessity for those who use [[language]] and are a product of language. This is a reference to [[castration]], [[castration]] of ''jouissance'', a [[lack]] of ''jouissance'' that is constituent of the [[subject]]. This loss of ''jouissance'' is a loss of the ''jouissance'' which is presumed to be possible with the [[Other]], but which is, in fact, lost from the beginning. The myth of a primary experience of satisfaction is an illusion to cover the fact that all satisfaction is marked by a loss in relation to a supposed initial, complete satisfaction. The primary effect of the [[signifier]] is the [[repression]] of [[the thing]] where we suppose full ''jouissance'' to be. Once the signifier is there, ''jouissance'' is not there so completely. And it is only because of the signifier, whose impact cuts and forces an expenditure of ''jouissance'' from the body, that it is possible to enjoy what remains, or is left over from this evacuating. What cannot be evacuated via the signifying operation remains as a ''jouissance'' around the [[erotogenic zones]], that to which the [[drive]] is articulated.<br />
<br />
What is left over after this negativization (—) of ''jouissance'' occurs at two levels. At one level, ''jouissance'' is redistributed outside the [[body]] in [[speech]], and there is thus a ''jouissance'' of [[speech]] itself, out-of-the-body ''jouissance''. On another level, at the level of the [[lost object]], [[object a]], there is a plus (+), a little compensation in the form of what is allowed of ''jouissance'', a compensation for the minus of the loss which has occurred in the forbidding of ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]].<br />
<br />
=====Symbolic Prohibition=====<br />
The [[prohibition]] of ''[[jouissance]]'' (the [[pleasure principle]]) is inherent in the [[symbolic]] [[structure]] of [[language]], which is why "''jouissance'' is forbidden to him who speaks, as such."<ref>{{E}} p. 319</ref> The [[subject]]'s entry into the [[symbolic]] is conditional upon a certain initial [[renunciation]] of ''[[jouissance]]'' in the [[castration complex]], when the [[subject]] gives up his attempts to be the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]] for the [[mother]].<br />
<br />
=====Law and Prohibition=====<br />
The [[Freud]]ian [[Oedipus]] refers to the [[father]] prohibiting access to the [[mother]], that is, the [[law]] prohibiting ''jouissance''. Lacan refers not only to a ''jouissance'' forbidden to the one who speaks, but the impossibility in the very [[structure]] itself of such a ''jouissance'', that is, a lack of ''jouissance'' in the essential of the [[structure]]. Thus, what is prohibited is, in fact, already impossible.<br />
<br />
=====''Plus-de jouir''=====<br />
The [[lack]] in the [[signifying order]], a [[lack]] in the [[Other]], which designates a lack of ''jouissance'', creates a place where lost objects come, standing in for the missing ''jouissance'' and creating a link between the signifying order and ''jouissance''. What is allowed of ''jouissance'' is in the [[surplus]] ''jouissance'' connected with [[object a]]. Here ''jouissance'' is embodied in the lost object. Although this object is lost and cannot be appropriated, it does restore a certain coefficient of ''jouissance''. This can be seen in the subject repeating him-/herself with his/her surplus ''jouissance'', ''[[plus-de jouir]]'', in the push of the [[drive]].<br />
<br />
=====Drive=====<br />
''[[Plus-de jouir]]'' can mean both more and no more; hence the ambiguity, both more ''jouir'' and no more ''jouir''. The [[drive]] turning around this lost object attempts to capture something of the lost ''jouissance''. This it fails to do, there is always a loss in the circuit of the drive, but there is a ''jouissance'' in the very [[repetition]] of this movement around the [[object a]], which it produces as a ''[[plus-de jouir]]''. In this structural approach, there is a structuring function of lack itself, and the loss of the primordial object of ''jouissance'' comes to operate as a cause, as seen in the function of [[object a]], the ''[[plus-de jouir]]''.<br />
<br />
=====Desire=====<br />
''Jouissance'' is denoted, in these years, in its [[dialectic]] with [[desire]]. Unrecognised [[desire]] brings the [[subject]] closer to a destructive ''jouissance'', which is often followed by retreat. This destructive ''jouissance'' has a Freudian illustration in the account of the case of the [[Ratman]], of whom Freud notes `the horror of a pleasure of which he was unaware' (Freud, S.E. 10, pp. 167-8).<br />
<br />
====1970s====<br />
[[Seminar XX]], [[Encore]], given in 1972-73, further elaborates Lacan's ideas on ''jouissance'' already outlined, and goes further with another aspect of ''jouissance'', ''[[feminine jouissance]]'', also known as the ''[[Other jouissance]]''. <br />
<br />
The speaking being is alone with his/her ''jouissance'' as it is not possible to share the ''jouissance'' of the Other. The axiom that Lacan has already given in earlier seminars, [[there is no sexual rapport]], comes to the foreground in Encore as male and female coming from a very different ''jouissance''; different and not complementary. It is a difference in the relation of the speaking being to ''jouissance'' which determines his being man or woman, not anatomical difference.<br />
<br />
=====Phallic ''Jouissance''=====<br />
Sexual ''jouissance'' is specified as an impasse. It is not what will allow a man and a woman to be joined. Sexual ''jouissance'' can follow no other path than that of [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' that has to pass through [[speech]]. The ''jouissance'' of man is produced by the [[structure]] of the [[signifier]], and is known as [[phallic]] ''jouissance''. The [[structure]] of [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' is the [[structure]] of the [[signifier]]. Lacan proposes a precise definition of man as being subject to [[castration]] and lacking a part of ''jouissance'', that which is required in order to use [[speech]]. All of man is subjected to the [[signifier]]. Man cannot relate directly with the [[Other]]. His partner is thus not the Other sex but an object, a piece of the body. Man looks for a little surplus ''jouissance'', that linked with object a, which has phallic value.<br />
<br />
The erotics embodied in [[object a]] is the ''jouissance'' that belongs to fantasy, aiming at a piece of the [[body]], and creating an illusion of a union linking the subject with a specific object. The ''jouissance'' of man is thus phallic ''jouissance'' together with surplus ''jouissance''. This is linked to his ideas of the 1960s outlined above. <br />
<br />
=====Other ''Jouissance''=====<br />
[[Woman]] is [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' with something more, a supplementary ''jouissance''. There is no universal definition of woman. Every woman must pass, like man, through the signifier. However, not all of woman is subjected to the signifier. Woman thus has the possibility of the experience of a ''jouissance'' which is not altogether phallic. This Other ''jouissance'', another kind of satisfaction, has to do with the relation to the Other and is not supported by the object and fantasy. <br />
<br />
Increasingly, in his works of the 1970s, Lacan points to the fact that language, in addition to having a signifier effect, also has an effect of ''jouissance''. In [[Television]], he equivocates between ''jouissance'', ''jouis-sens'' (enjoyment in sense) and the ''jouissance'' effect, the enjoyment of one's own unconscious, even if it is through pain (Lacan, 1990). The [[unconscious]] is emphasized as enjoyment playing through substitution, with ''jouissance'' located in the jargon itself. ''Jouissance'' thus refers to the specific way in which each subject enjoys his/her unconscious. <br />
<br />
=====''Lalangue''=====<br />
The motor of the unconscious ''jouissance'' is ''lalangue'', also described as babbling or mother tongue. The unconscious is made of ''lalangue''. Lacan writes it as ''lalangue'' to show that language always intervenes in the form of lallation or mother tongue and that the unconscious is a `knowing how to do things' with ''lalangue''. The practice of psychoanalysis, which promotes free association, aims to cut through the apparent coherent, complete system of language in order to emphasize the inconsistencies and holes with which the speaking being has to deal. The ''lalangue'' of the unconscious, that which blurts out when least expected, provides a ''jouissance'' in its very play. Every ''lalangue'' is unique to a subject. <br />
<br />
''Jouis-sens'' also refers to the [[super-ego]]'s [[demand]] to enjoy, a cruel imperative - enjoy! - that the subject will never be able to satisfy. The super-ego promotes the ''jouissance'' that it simultaneously prohibits. The Freudian reference to the super-ego is one of a paradoxical functioning, secretly feeding on the very satisfaction that it commands to be renounced. The severity of the super-ego is therefore a vehicle for ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
In '[[La Troisième]]', presented in Rome in 1974 (Écrits, 1977), Lacan elaborates the third ''jouissance'', jouis-sens, the ''jouissance'' of meaning, the ''jouissance'' of the unconscious, in reference to its locus in the [[Borromean knot]]. He locates the three ''jouissance''s in relation to the intersections of the three circles of the knot, the circles of the [[Real]], the [[Symbolic]] and the [[Imaginary]]. The Borromean knot is a topos in which the logical and clinical dimensions of the three ''jouissance''s are linked together: the Other ''jouissance'', that is the ''jouissance'' of the body, is located at the intersection of the Real and the Imaginary; phallic ''jouissance'' is situated within the common space of the Symbolic and the Real; the ''jouissance'' of meaning, jouis-sens, is located at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It is the [[object a]] that holds the central, irreducible place between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.<br />
<br />
=====Feminine ''Jouissance''=====<br />
<!-- There are strong affinitites between [[Lacan]]'s concept of ''[[jouissance]]'' and [[Freud]]'s concept of the [[libido]], as is clear from [[Lacan]]'s description of ''[[jouissance]]'' as a "bodily substance."<ref>{{S20}} p. 26</ref> In keeping with [[Freud]]'s assertion that there is only one [[libido]], which is [[masculine]], [[Lacan]] states that ''[[jouissance]]'' is essentially [[phallic]]; <blockquote>''Jouissance'', insofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to the Other as such."<ref>{{S20}} p. 14</ref></blockquote> <br />
However, in 1973 [[Lacan]] admits that there is a specifically [[feminine]] ''[[jouissance]]'', a "supplementary ''jouissance''"<ref>{{S20}} p. 58</ref> which is "beyond the phallus,"<ref>{{S20}} p. 69</ref> a ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. This [[jouissance|feminine jouissance]] is ineffable, for [[women]] experience it but know nothing about it.<ref>{{S20}} p. 71</ref> In order to differentiate between these two forms of ''[[jouissance]]'', [[Lacan]] introduces different [[algebra|algebraic]] [[symbol]]s for each; '''Jφ''' designates [[phallus|phallic ''jouissance'']], whereas '''JA''' designates the ''[[jouissance]]'' of the [[Other]]. --><br />
<br />
[[Lacan]] states that "''[[jouissance]]'', insofar as it is sexual, is [[phallus|phallic]], which means that it does not relate to the Other as such."<ref>{{S20}} p. 14</ref> However, he argues that there is a specifically [[feminine]] ''[[jouissance]]'', a "supplementary ''jouissance''"<ref>{{S20}} p. 58</ref> which is "beyond the phallus,"<ref>{{S20}} p. 69</ref> a ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. In order to differentiate between these two forms of ''[[jouissance]]'', [[Lacan]] introduces different [[algebra|algebraic]] [[symbol]]s for each; '''Jφ''' designates [[phallus|phallic ''jouissance'']], whereas '''JA''' designates the ''[[jouissance]]'' of the [[Other]].<br />
<br />
<!-- ==Master and Slave==<br />
In the [[seminars]] of 1953-4 and 1954-5 [[Lacan]] uses the term occasionally, usually in the context of the [[Hegel]]ian [[dialectic]] of the [[master]] and the [[slave]]: the [[slave]] is forced to work to provide objects for the [[master]]'s [[enjoyment]] (''[[jouissance]]'').<ref>{{S1}} p. 223; {{S2}} p. 269</ref> --><br />
<br />
==''Jouissance'' and the Clinic==<br />
Lacan's contribution to the clinic is paramount in regard to the operation of ''jouissance'' in neurosis, perversion and psychosis. The three structures can be viewed as strategies with respect to dealing with ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
=====Neurosis=====<br />
The [[neurotic]] [[subject]] does not want to sacrifice his/her castration to the ''jouissance'' of the Other (Écrits, 1977). It is an imaginary castration that is clung to in order not to have to acknowledge Symbolic castration, the subjection to language and its consequent loss of ''jouissance''. The neurotic subject asks 'why me, that I have to sacrifice this castration, this piece of flesh, to the Other?' Here we encounter the neurotic belief that it would be possible to attain a complete ''jouissance'' if it were not forbidden and if it were not for some Other who is demanding his/her castration. Instead of seeing the lack in the Other the neurotic sees the Other's demand of him/her. <br />
<br />
=====Perversion=====<br />
The [[Pervert]] imagines him-/herself to be the Other in order to ensure his/her ''jouissance''. The perverse subject makes him-/herself the instrument of the Other's ''jouissance'' through putting the object a in the place of the barred Other, negating the Other as subject. His/her ''jouissance'' comes from placing him-/herself as an object in order to procure the ''jouissance'' of a phallus, even though he/she doesn't know to whom this phallus belongs. Although the pervert presents him-/herself as completely engaged in seeking ''jouissance'', one of his/her aims is to make the law present. Lacan uses the term père-version, to demonstrate the way in which the pervert appeals to the father to fulfil the paternal function.<br />
<br />
=====Practice=====<br />
The [[practice]] of [[psychoanalysis]] examines the different ways and means the subject uses to produce ''jouissance''. It is by means of the bien dire, the well-spoken, where the subject comes to speak in a new way, a way of speaking the truth, that a different distribution of ''jouissance'' may be achieved. The analytic act is a cut, a break with a certain mode of ''jouissance'' fixed in the fantasy. The consequent crossing of the fantasy leaves the subject having to endure being alone with his/her own ''jouissance'' and to encounter its operation in the drive, a unique, singular way of being alone with one's own ''jouissance''. The cut of the analytic act leaves the subject having to make his/her own something that was formerly alien. This produces a new stance in relation to ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
=====Psychosis=====<br />
In [[psychosis]], ''jouissance'' is reintroduced in the place of the Other. The ''jouissance'' involved here is called ''jouissance'' of the Other, because ''jouissance'' is sacrificed to the Other, often in the most mutilating ways, like cutting off a piece of the body as an offering to what is believed to be the command of the Other to be completed. The body is not emptied of ''jouissance'' via the effect of the signifier and castration, which usually operate to exteriorise ''jouissance'' and give order to the drives.<br />
<br />
In [[Schreber]] we see the manifestation of the ways in which the body is not emptied of ''jouissance''. Shreber describes a body invaded by a ''jouissance'' that is ascribed to the ''jouissance'' of the Other, the ''jouissance'' of God. <br />
<br />
The practice of psychoanalysis with the psychotic differs from that of the neurotic. Given that the psychotic is in the position of the object of the Other's ''jouissance'', where the Uncontrolled action of the death drive lies, what is aimed at is the modification of this position in regard to the ''jouissance'' in the structure. This involves an effort to link in a chain, the isolated, persecuting signifiers in order to initiate a place for the subject outside the ''jouissance'' of the Other. Psychoanalysis attempts to modify the effect of the Other's ''jouissance'' in the body, according to the shift of the subject in the structure. The psychotic does not escape the structure, but there can be a modification of unlimited, deadly ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
''Jouissance'', or enjoyment, does not equate simply to pleasure. In the Freudian sense, enjoyment is located beyond the pleasure principle. In his clinical practice, Freud had already observed incidents of self-harm and the strange compulsion in certain patients to keep revisiting the very experiences that were so disturbing and traumatic for them. Th is paradoxical phenomenon of deriving a kind of satisfaction through suffering, or pleasure through pain, is what Lacan designates as ''jouissance''. If pleasure functions in terms of balance, achieving discrete objectives and so on, enjoyment is destabilizing and tends towards excess. Enjoyment can be characterized as a kind of existential electricity that not only animates the subject but also threatens to destroy them. In this regard, enjoyment is always both before and beyond the symbolic field; it drives the symbolic but can never be fully captured by it. If the body of Frankenstein’s monster is the intelligible symbolic structure, then lightning is the raw substance of enjoyment that reflects the primordial character of human drives and obsessions.<br />
<br />
According to Lacan, jouissance has a Real status and is the only “substance” recognized in psychoanalysis. Indeed, a central goal of psychoanalysis is not so much to bring to light the “guilt” of the analysand but rather to get at their “perverse enjoyment” (''SVII'': 4–5): the excessive forms of investment in guilt that are themselves symptomatic of a particular mode of ''jouissance'' rooted in the Real. This is why Lacan characterizes the [[superego]] – the inherent agency of guilt that constantly recycles feelings of inadequacy and makes impossible demands of the subject – in terms of a primary injunction: namely, enjoy! (''SXX'': 3).<br />
<br />
Although ''jouissance'' is viewed as a (non-discursive) “substance”, it is not one that possesses any independence or positivity of its own. ''Jouissance'' is something that can be signposted only in relation to a limit imposed by the pleasure principle (''SXVII'': 46). It emerges as a beyond in relation to this limit – as that which marks the domain of forbidden and/or obscene excesses. To approach this from a different angle, ''jouissance'' is produced as the excess of repression; without this repression, there can be no jouissance (''LN'': 308). This is why ''jouissance'' cannot be directly targeted or apprehended (despite the ambition of the “politics of enjoyment” and its various incarnations). At the same time, it cannot be directly eliminated. ''Jouissance'' is something that always sticks to the subject.<br />
<br />
David Fincher’s ''Seven'' is illustrative of the dynamics of ''jouissance''. Two detectives, Mills and Somerset, set out to investigate a series of brutal murders committed as a “sermon” on the seven deadly sins by John Doe. Doe’s victims are chosen on the grounds that they embody a particular sinful excess and are subsequently dispatched in an elaborately sadistic manner. He seeks to punishexecute his victims not because of any legal transgression but because they do not conform to the imaginary unity, the homeostatic ego-ideal, of a God-fearing community. Here we might say that Doe becomes a superego manifestation who acts beyond the law on behalf of the law, fi lling in for its failures (something similar could be said about Batman and various other super(ego)-heroes).<br />
<br />
There are two especially perceptive insights in this film. The first concerns the intrinsic character of ''jouissance'': the more Doe renounces earthly pleasures in pursuit of his cause, the more his enjoyment-in-renunciation is revealed. What Doe attempts to conceal is precisely the surplus enjoyment he takes in personal sacrifice and in stoically carrying out his duty. His enjoyment is not so much an immediate gratification in violence, but rather an obscene satisfaction in carrying out complicated and ritualized killings/torture as part of a divine mission sanctioned by God. Doe is, in fact, a classic pervert who tries to hide his enjoyment behind his perceived ethical obligation. Put in other terms, he expresses the classic ideological alibi: “I was not there as a being of enjoyment but as a functionary of duty.” This also reflects Žižek’s point against [[Hannah Arendt]] and her conclusion regarding the routinized nature of the extermination of Jews as a “banality of evil” (Arendt 1963). That is to say, what Arendt misses is the way in which the bureaucratization itself became “a source of an additional jouissance” (''PF'': 55); a surplus satisfaction gained from carrying out the daily torture and humiliations in the guise of a [[Kantianism|Kantian]] sense of impersonal duty, as an instrument of the Other’s will (the law/state/universal mission, etc.). The essence of the matter is not so much the “banality of evil”, but rather the evil/excessive ''jouissance'' contained and nurtured within the banality itself.<br />
<br />
The second concerns the way in which Doe inscribes himself in his “sermon”. At the denouement of the film, Mills learns of his wife’s murder (her decapitated head is delivered in a package) and is consequently seized by the sin of wrath: he “over-kills” Doe in an act of desperate rage. Prior to this, Doe confesses to a powerful envy of Mills and his married life. By declaring (and demonstrating) this excess, Doe stages his own execution and literally enjoys himself to death – thus completing the circle.<br />
<br />
From a Lacanian perspective, what this reflects is the way in which ''jouissance'' functions in terms of its “[[extimacy]]”. Extimacy is a hybrid word that combines the terms exteriority and intimacy. For Lacan it refers to “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (''SVII'': 71). It is along these lines that [[Jacques-Alain Miller]] affirms that the hatred of the Other’s enjoyment is ultimately a hatred of our own enjoyment (Miller 2008). The image of the Other’s enjoyment is so compelling precisely because it symbolizes the Lacanian “in us more than ourselves”. In this sense, the Other is always someone who gives body to the very excess of enjoyment that in our innermost being denies us homeostasis. What ''jouissance'' bears witness to is not the unbearable difference of the Other but, on the contrary, an unbearable sameness – that is, the very fascination with (the projected sense of) the Other’s enjoyment draws the subject into too close a proximity with their own disturbing excesses.<br />
<br />
In this context, we should read Doe’s confession as fake. His real “sin” is not envy but denial. What he denies is that his entire economy of righteous retribution is driven by enjoyment. His confession functions precisely as a way of sustaining this economy at a safe distance from any direct encounter with his traumatic excesses. By sacrificing himself, he is able to avoid any confrontation with his mode of private enjoyment – it is the opposite of what Lacan means by an act. We see a similar type of logic at play in the phenomenon of stalking. In their [[over-identification]] with their [[object of desire]] (often a celebrity), the stalker is drawn into an unbearable proximity with their excesses (the anxiety generated by their obsessional economy), which they then try to resolve through an act of severance – suicide, an assault on the target of their obsession, and so on.<br />
<br />
[[Ideology]] derives its potency from its ability to manipulate economies of enjoyment. Th rough its repressive mechanisms, the social order relies upon a certain renunciation, or loss, of enjoyment. But as Lacan points out, this enjoyment is not something that was previously possessed; it is an epiphenomenal excess of social repression itself. Where ideology succeeds is in fantasmatically translating this sense of lost enjoyment into the theft of enjoyment (Miller 2008). From a racist perspective, the immigrant is someone with perverse forms of excessive enjoyment (they are idlers living off “our” state benefits and they work too hard, taking “our” jobs, etc.) and who thereby steals and/or corrupts our enjoyment (our “way of life”). And thus what “we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us” (''TN'': 203).<br />
<br />
At the same time, ideology “bribes” the subject into accepting repression/renunciation by providing subliminal access to a surplus enjoyment – that is, an extra enjoyment generated through the renunciation of enjoyment itself (''TN'': 308–9). What is manifest in fascism, for example, is the way in which the subject derives surplus enjoyment through acts of sacrifice (renouncing personal enjoyment) in the name of doing one’s duty to the nation. With today’s (Western) ideology – basically a capitalist fatalism (“the economy is what it is”) in support of private pleasures – the subject is bribed in a different way. Ideology no longer operates simply with a particular utopian vision or with definitive objectives. Contemporary ideology consists rather in assigning demands for change to the realm of “impossibility” (as so much “ideological fantasy”). What ideology offers the subject is the fantasy of change (“freedom of choice”, “opportunities”, etc.) precisely as a means of avoiding any real (or Real) change. Change is sustained as a fantasmatic abstraction in order to prevent (the fear of) any traumatic loss of enjoyment. We see this type of ideological operation in films like ''Bruce Almighty'' where the hero actually becomes God, capable of anything, but whose own world falls apart as a result – and so he returns to a more humble “mature” existence.<br />
<br />
One of the central lessons of psychoanalysis is that while enjoyment is experienced as Real, it is ultimately an empty spectre, a kind of anamorphic effect of symbolic circumscription. Against its numerous ideological manipulations, we need to find ways of accepting, and living with, this traumatic knowledge. Extemporizing on an old Marxist maxim, when it comes to ''jouissance'' we have nothing to lose but the myth of loss itself.<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Borromean knot]]<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Death drive]]<br />
* [[Drive]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Desire]]<br />
* [[Ethics]]<br />
* [[Imaginary]]<br />
* [[Law]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Libido]]<br />
* [[Mother]]<br />
* [[Neurosis]]<br />
* [[Oedipus complex]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Perversion]]<br />
* [[Phallus]]<br />
* [[Pleasure principle]]<br />
* [[Psychosis]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Structure]]<br />
* [[Super-ego]]<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<div style="font-size:11px" class="references-small"><br />
<references /><br />
* Freud, S. (1951) [1905] 'The Three Essays on Sexuality'. S.E. 7: pp. 125-244. In: Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.<br />
* Freud, S. (1951) Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. S.E. I0: pp. 153-319.<br />
* Freud, S. (1951) [1920] Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E. I8: pp. 3-64.<br />
* Lacan, J. (1970) 'Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever' in The Structuralist ''Jouissance'' 109 Controversy, Richard Macksay and Eugenio Donato (eds). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 194. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1975) Seminar XX, Encore (1972-73). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, p. 10. Now translated by Bruce Fink (1998) under the title of On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge I972-1973, Encore. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 3. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1958) 'The youth of A. Gide', April, 1958; `The signification of the phallus', May, 1958; 'On the theory of symbolism in Ernest Jones', March, 1959, in Écrits. Paris: Seuil. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1977) [1960]. 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious' in Écrits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: W.W. Norton. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1990) Television. New York: W.W. Norton. (note 5), p. 325. Carmela Levy-Stokes<br />
</div><br />
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{{OK}}<br />
[[Category:Real]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek_Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Jouissance&diff=43762Jouissance2019-04-15T02:09:12Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div><!-- <br />
{| align="right" style="line-height:2.0em;text-align:right;background-color:#fcfcfc;border:1px solid #aaa" <br />
| [[English]]: ''[[enjoyment]]''<br />
|}<br />
--><br />
==Translation==<br />
===Enjoyment===<br />
''[[Jouissance]]'', and the corresponding verb, ''[[jouir]]'', refer to an extreme [[pleasure]]. It is not possible to translate this French word, ''jouissance'', precisely. Sometimes it is translated as '[[enjoyment]]', but enjoyment has a reference to pleasure, and ''jouissance'' is an enjoyment that always has a deadly reference, a paradoxical pleasure, reaching an almost intolerable level of excitation. Due to the specificity of the French term, it is usually left untranslated.<br />
<br />
<!-- There is no adequate translation in [[English]] of the word ''[[jouissance]]''.<ref>It is therefore left untranslated in most English editions of [[Lacan]].</ref> "[[Enjoyment]]" does convey the sense, contained in ''[[jouissance]]'', of ''enjoyment of rights'', of ''property'', etc., but it lacks the ''sexual connotations'' of the [[French]] word. (''Jouir'' is slang for "to come".) --><br />
<!-- But it also refers to those moments when too much pleasure is pain. --><br />
<!-- The term signifies the ecstatic or orgasmic [[enjoyment]] - and exquisite [[pain]] - of something or someone. In [[French]], ''[[jouissance]]'' includes the [[enjoyment]] of rights and property, but also the slang verb, ''[[jouissance|jouir]]'', to come, and so is related to the [[pleasure]] of the [[sexual relationship|sexual act]].--> <br />
<br />
===Pleasure===<br />
<!-- Lacan develops this opposition in 1960, in the context of his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. --><br />
<!-- In 1960 [[Lacan]] develops an opposition --><br />
[[Lacan]] makes an important distinction between ''[[jouissance]]'' and ''[[plaisir]]'' ([[pleasure]]). [[Pleasure]] obeys the [[law]] of homeostasis that [[Freud]] evokes in ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'', whereby, through discharge, the [[psyche]] seeks the lowest possible level of tension. The [[pleasure principle]] thus functions as a limit imposed on [[enjoyment]]; it commands the [[subject]] to "enjoy as little as possible." ''[[Jouissance]]'' transgresses this [[law]] and, in that respect, it is ''beyond'' the [[pleasure principle]].<br />
<!-- ''[[Jouissance]]'' goes beyond ''[[plaisir]]''. --><br />
<!-- However, the result of transgressing the [[pleasure principle]] is not more [[pleasure]], but pain, since there is only a certain amount of [[pleasure]] that the [[subject]] can bear. Beyond this limit, [[pleasure]] becomes [[pain]], and this "painful pleasure" is what [[Lacan]] calls ''[[jouissance]]''. "''Jouissance'' is suffering."<ref>{{S7}} p. 184</ref> The term ''[[jouissance]]'' thus nicely expresses the paradoxical [[satisfaction]] that the [[subject]] derives from his [[symptom]], or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his on [[satisfaction]]. --><br />
<br />
<!-- ==Masochism== There is an important difference between [[masochism]] and [[jouissance]]. In [[masochism]], [[pain]] is a means to [[pleasure]]; [[pleasure]] is taken in the very fact of [[pain|suffering]] itself, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish [[pleasure]] from [[pain]]. With ''[[jouissance]]'', on the other hand, [[pleasure]] and [[pain]] remain distinct; no [[pleasure]] is taken in the [[pain]] itself, but the [[pleasure]] cannot be obtained without paying the price of [[pain|suffering]]. It is thus a kind of ''deal'' in which "[[pleasure]] ''and'' [[pain]] are presented as a single packet."<ref>Seminar of 27 February 1963. J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. p. 189.</ref> --><br />
<br />
<!-- <blockquote>"Castration means that ''jouissance'' must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (''l'échelle renversée'') of the Law of desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 324</ref></blockquote> --><br />
The [[symbolic]] [[prohibition]] of [[enjoyment]] in the [[Oedipus complex]] (the [[incest]] [[taboo]]) is thus, paradoxically, the [[prohibition]] of something which is already impossible; its function is therefore to sustain the [[neurotic]] [[illusion]] that [[enjoyment]] would be attainable if it were not forbidden. The very prohibition creates the [[desire]] to transgress it, and ''[[jouissance]]'' is therefore fundamentally transgressive.<ref>{{S7}} Ch. 15</ref><br />
<br />
==Development==<br />
===Sigmund Freud===<br />
=====Death Drive=====<br />
The [[death drive]] is the name given to that constant [[desire]] in the [[subject]] to break through the [[pleasure principle]] towards the [[Thing]] and a certain [[surplus|excess]] ''[[jouissance]]''; thus ''[[jouissance]]'' is "the path towards death".<ref>{{S17}} p. 17</ref><br />
<br />
Insofar as the [[drive]]s are attempts to break through the [[pleasure principle]] in search of ''[[jouissance]]'', every [[drive]] is a [[death drive]].<br />
<br />
===Jacques Lacan===<br />
====1953 - 1960====<br />
=====Master-Slave Dialectic=====<br />
''Jouissance'' is not a central preoccupation during the first part of<br />
Lacan's teaching. ''Jouissance'' appears in Lacan's work in the [[seminars]] of [[Seminar I|1953-54]] and [[Seminar II|1954-55]], and is referred to in some other works (''[[Écrits]]'', 1977). In these early years ''[[jouissance]]'' is not elaborated in any [[structure|structural sense]], the reference being mainly to [[Hegel]] and the [[master—slave]] [[dialectic]], where the [[slave]] must facilitate the [[master]]'s ''jouissance'' through his work in producing objects for the master.<br />
<br />
=====Sexual Reference=====<br />
From 1957 the sexual reference of ''jouissance'' as orgasm emerges into the foreground. This is the more popular use of the term ''jouissance'', with ''jouir'' meaning `to come'.<br />
<br />
=====''The Ethics of Psychoanalysis''=====<br />
In his [[seminar]] of [[Seminar VII|1959-60]], [[Seminar VII|The Ethics of Psychoanalysis]], Lacan deals for the first time with the [[Real]] and ''jouissance''. Although the [[Real]] of the 1960s is not the same as his use of the Real in the 1980s, the first concepts emerge in this seminar. Here ''jouissance'' is considered in its function of [[evil]], that which is ascribed to a neighbour, but which dwells in the most intimate part of the [[subject]], [[extimate|intimate]] and [[alienated]] at the same time, as it is that from which the [[subject]] flees, experiencing [[aggression]] at the very approach of an encounter with his/her own ''jouissance''. The chapters in this seminar address such concepts as the ''jouissance'' of [[transgression]] and the paradox of ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
====1960s====<br />
=====Symbolic Castration=====<br />
It is in the text '[[The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious]]' that a [[structure|structural]] account of ''jouissance'' is first given in connection with the [[subject]]'s entry into the [[symbolic]] (Lacan, 1977).<br />
<br />
The [[speaking]] [[being]] has to use the [[signifier]], which comes from the [[Other]]. This has an effect of cutting any notion of a complete ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. The [[signifier]] forbids the ''jouissance'' of the [[body]] of the Other. Complete ''jouissance'' is thus [[forbidden]] to the one who speaks, that is, to all speaking beings. This refers to a loss of ''jouissance'' which is a necessity for those who use [[language]] and are a product of language. This is a reference to [[castration]], [[castration]] of ''jouissance'', a [[lack]] of ''jouissance'' that is constituent of the [[subject]]. This loss of ''jouissance'' is a loss of the ''jouissance'' which is presumed to be possible with the [[Other]], but which is, in fact, lost from the beginning. The myth of a primary experience of satisfaction is an illusion to cover the fact that all satisfaction is marked by a loss in relation to a supposed initial, complete satisfaction. The primary effect of the [[signifier]] is the [[repression]] of [[the thing]] where we suppose full ''jouissance'' to be. Once the signifier is there, ''jouissance'' is not there so completely. And it is only because of the signifier, whose impact cuts and forces an expenditure of ''jouissance'' from the body, that it is possible to enjoy what remains, or is left over from this evacuating. What cannot be evacuated via the signifying operation remains as a ''jouissance'' around the [[erotogenic zones]], that to which the [[drive]] is articulated.<br />
<br />
What is left over after this negativization (—) of ''jouissance'' occurs at two levels. At one level, ''jouissance'' is redistributed outside the [[body]] in [[speech]], and there is thus a ''jouissance'' of [[speech]] itself, out-of-the-body ''jouissance''. On another level, at the level of the [[lost object]], [[object a]], there is a plus (+), a little compensation in the form of what is allowed of ''jouissance'', a compensation for the minus of the loss which has occurred in the forbidding of ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]].<br />
<br />
=====Symbolic Prohibition=====<br />
The [[prohibition]] of ''[[jouissance]]'' (the [[pleasure principle]]) is inherent in the [[symbolic]] [[structure]] of [[language]], which is why "''jouissance'' is forbidden to him who speaks, as such."<ref>{{E}} p. 319</ref> The [[subject]]'s entry into the [[symbolic]] is conditional upon a certain initial [[renunciation]] of ''[[jouissance]]'' in the [[castration complex]], when the [[subject]] gives up his attempts to be the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]] for the [[mother]].<br />
<br />
=====Law and Prohibition=====<br />
The [[Freud]]ian [[Oedipus]] refers to the [[father]] prohibiting access to the [[mother]], that is, the [[law]] prohibiting ''jouissance''. Lacan refers not only to a ''jouissance'' forbidden to the one who speaks, but the impossibility in the very [[structure]] itself of such a ''jouissance'', that is, a lack of ''jouissance'' in the essential of the [[structure]]. Thus, what is prohibited is, in fact, already impossible.<br />
<br />
=====''Plus-de jouir''=====<br />
The [[lack]] in the [[signifying order]], a [[lack]] in the [[Other]], which designates a lack of ''jouissance'', creates a place where lost objects come, standing in for the missing ''jouissance'' and creating a link between the signifying order and ''jouissance''. What is allowed of ''jouissance'' is in the [[surplus]] ''jouissance'' connected with [[object a]]. Here ''jouissance'' is embodied in the lost object. Although this object is lost and cannot be appropriated, it does restore a certain coefficient of ''jouissance''. This can be seen in the subject repeating him-/herself with his/her surplus ''jouissance'', ''[[plus-de jouir]]'', in the push of the [[drive]].<br />
<br />
=====Drive=====<br />
''[[Plus-de jouir]]'' can mean both more and no more; hence the ambiguity, both more ''jouir'' and no more ''jouir''. The [[drive]] turning around this lost object attempts to capture something of the lost ''jouissance''. This it fails to do, there is always a loss in the circuit of the drive, but there is a ''jouissance'' in the very [[repetition]] of this movement around the [[object a]], which it produces as a ''[[plus-de jouir]]''. In this structural approach, there is a structuring function of lack itself, and the loss of the primordial object of ''jouissance'' comes to operate as a cause, as seen in the function of [[object a]], the ''[[plus-de jouir]]''.<br />
<br />
=====Desire=====<br />
''Jouissance'' is denoted, in these years, in its [[dialectic]] with [[desire]]. Unrecognised [[desire]] brings the [[subject]] closer to a destructive ''jouissance'', which is often followed by retreat. This destructive ''jouissance'' has a Freudian illustration in the account of the case of the [[Ratman]], of whom Freud notes `the horror of a pleasure of which he was unaware' (Freud, S.E. 10, pp. 167-8).<br />
<br />
====1970s====<br />
[[Seminar XX]], [[Encore]], given in 1972-73, further elaborates Lacan's ideas on ''jouissance'' already outlined, and goes further with another aspect of ''jouissance'', ''[[feminine jouissance]]'', also known as the ''[[Other jouissance]]''. <br />
<br />
The speaking being is alone with his/her ''jouissance'' as it is not possible to share the ''jouissance'' of the Other. The axiom that Lacan has already given in earlier seminars, [[there is no sexual rapport]], comes to the foreground in Encore as male and female coming from a very different ''jouissance''; different and not complementary. It is a difference in the relation of the speaking being to ''jouissance'' which determines his being man or woman, not anatomical difference.<br />
<br />
=====Phallic ''Jouissance''=====<br />
Sexual ''jouissance'' is specified as an impasse. It is not what will allow a man and a woman to be joined. Sexual ''jouissance'' can follow no other path than that of [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' that has to pass through [[speech]]. The ''jouissance'' of man is produced by the [[structure]] of the [[signifier]], and is known as [[phallic]] ''jouissance''. The [[structure]] of [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' is the [[structure]] of the [[signifier]]. Lacan proposes a precise definition of man as being subject to [[castration]] and lacking a part of ''jouissance'', that which is required in order to use [[speech]]. All of man is subjected to the [[signifier]]. Man cannot relate directly with the [[Other]]. His partner is thus not the Other sex but an object, a piece of the body. Man looks for a little surplus ''jouissance'', that linked with object a, which has phallic value.<br />
<br />
The erotics embodied in [[object a]] is the ''jouissance'' that belongs to fantasy, aiming at a piece of the [[body]], and creating an illusion of a union linking the subject with a specific object. The ''jouissance'' of man is thus phallic ''jouissance'' together with surplus ''jouissance''. This is linked to his ideas of the 1960s outlined above. <br />
<br />
=====Other ''Jouissance''=====<br />
[[Woman]] is [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' with something more, a supplementary ''jouissance''. There is no universal definition of woman. Every woman must pass, like man, through the signifier. However, not all of woman is subjected to the signifier. Woman thus has the possibility of the experience of a ''jouissance'' which is not altogether phallic. This Other ''jouissance'', another kind of satisfaction, has to do with the relation to the Other and is not supported by the object and fantasy. <br />
<br />
Increasingly, in his works of the 1970s, Lacan points to the fact that language, in addition to having a signifier effect, also has an effect of ''jouissance''. In [[Television]], he equivocates between ''jouissance'', ''jouis-sens'' (enjoyment in sense) and the ''jouissance'' effect, the enjoyment of one's own unconscious, even if it is through pain (Lacan, 1990). The [[unconscious]] is emphasized as enjoyment playing through substitution, with ''jouissance'' located in the jargon itself. ''Jouissance'' thus refers to the specific way in which each subject enjoys his/her unconscious. <br />
<br />
=====''Lalangue''=====<br />
The motor of the unconscious ''jouissance'' is ''lalangue'', also described as babbling or mother tongue. The unconscious is made of ''lalangue''. Lacan writes it as ''lalangue'' to show that language always intervenes in the form of lallation or mother tongue and that the unconscious is a `knowing how to do things' with ''lalangue''. The practice of psychoanalysis, which promotes free association, aims to cut through the apparent coherent, complete system of language in order to emphasize the inconsistencies and holes with which the speaking being has to deal. The ''lalangue'' of the unconscious, that which blurts out when least expected, provides a ''jouissance'' in its very play. Every ''lalangue'' is unique to a subject. <br />
<br />
''Jouis-sens'' also refers to the [[super-ego]]'s [[demand]] to enjoy, a cruel imperative - enjoy! - that the subject will never be able to satisfy. The super-ego promotes the ''jouissance'' that it simultaneously prohibits. The Freudian reference to the super-ego is one of a paradoxical functioning, secretly feeding on the very satisfaction that it commands to be renounced. The severity of the super-ego is therefore a vehicle for ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
In '[[La Troisième]]', presented in Rome in 1974 (Écrits, 1977), Lacan elaborates the third ''jouissance'', jouis-sens, the ''jouissance'' of meaning, the ''jouissance'' of the unconscious, in reference to its locus in the [[Borromean knot]]. He locates the three ''jouissance''s in relation to the intersections of the three circles of the knot, the circles of the [[Real]], the [[Symbolic]] and the [[Imaginary]]. The Borromean knot is a topos in which the logical and clinical dimensions of the three ''jouissance''s are linked together: the Other ''jouissance'', that is the ''jouissance'' of the body, is located at the intersection of the Real and the Imaginary; phallic ''jouissance'' is situated within the common space of the Symbolic and the Real; the ''jouissance'' of meaning, jouis-sens, is located at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It is the [[object a]] that holds the central, irreducible place between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.<br />
<br />
=====Feminine ''Jouissance''=====<br />
<!-- There are strong affinitites between [[Lacan]]'s concept of ''[[jouissance]]'' and [[Freud]]'s concept of the [[libido]], as is clear from [[Lacan]]'s description of ''[[jouissance]]'' as a "bodily substance."<ref>{{S20}} p. 26</ref> In keeping with [[Freud]]'s assertion that there is only one [[libido]], which is [[masculine]], [[Lacan]] states that ''[[jouissance]]'' is essentially [[phallic]]; <blockquote>''Jouissance'', insofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to the Other as such."<ref>{{S20}} p. 14</ref></blockquote> <br />
However, in 1973 [[Lacan]] admits that there is a specifically [[feminine]] ''[[jouissance]]'', a "supplementary ''jouissance''"<ref>{{S20}} p. 58</ref> which is "beyond the phallus,"<ref>{{S20}} p. 69</ref> a ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. This [[jouissance|feminine jouissance]] is ineffable, for [[women]] experience it but know nothing about it.<ref>{{S20}} p. 71</ref> In order to differentiate between these two forms of ''[[jouissance]]'', [[Lacan]] introduces different [[algebra|algebraic]] [[symbol]]s for each; '''Jφ''' designates [[phallus|phallic ''jouissance'']], whereas '''JA''' designates the ''[[jouissance]]'' of the [[Other]]. --><br />
<br />
[[Lacan]] states that "''[[jouissance]]'', insofar as it is sexual, is [[phallus|phallic]], which means that it does not relate to the Other as such."<ref>{{S20}} p. 14</ref> However, he argues that there is a specifically [[feminine]] ''[[jouissance]]'', a "supplementary ''jouissance''"<ref>{{S20}} p. 58</ref> which is "beyond the phallus,"<ref>{{S20}} p. 69</ref> a ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. In order to differentiate between these two forms of ''[[jouissance]]'', [[Lacan]] introduces different [[algebra|algebraic]] [[symbol]]s for each; '''Jφ''' designates [[phallus|phallic ''jouissance'']], whereas '''JA''' designates the ''[[jouissance]]'' of the [[Other]].<br />
<br />
<!-- ==Master and Slave==<br />
In the [[seminars]] of 1953-4 and 1954-5 [[Lacan]] uses the term occasionally, usually in the context of the [[Hegel]]ian [[dialectic]] of the [[master]] and the [[slave]]: the [[slave]] is forced to work to provide objects for the [[master]]'s [[enjoyment]] (''[[jouissance]]'').<ref>{{S1}} p. 223; {{S2}} p. 269</ref> --><br />
<br />
==''Jouissance'' and the Clinic==<br />
Lacan's contribution to the clinic is paramount in regard to the operation of ''jouissance'' in neurosis, perversion and psychosis. The three structures can be viewed as strategies with respect to dealing with ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
=====Neurosis=====<br />
The [[neurotic]] [[subject]] does not want to sacrifice his/her castration to the ''jouissance'' of the Other (Écrits, 1977). It is an imaginary castration that is clung to in order not to have to acknowledge Symbolic castration, the subjection to language and its consequent loss of ''jouissance''. The neurotic subject asks 'why me, that I have to sacrifice this castration, this piece of flesh, to the Other?' Here we encounter the neurotic belief that it would be possible to attain a complete ''jouissance'' if it were not forbidden and if it were not for some Other who is demanding his/her castration. Instead of seeing the lack in the Other the neurotic sees the Other's demand of him/her. <br />
<br />
=====Perversion=====<br />
The [[Pervert]] imagines him-/herself to be the Other in order to ensure his/her ''jouissance''. The perverse subject makes him-/herself the instrument of the Other's ''jouissance'' through putting the object a in the place of the barred Other, negating the Other as subject. His/her ''jouissance'' comes from placing him-/herself as an object in order to procure the ''jouissance'' of a phallus, even though he/she doesn't know to whom this phallus belongs. Although the pervert presents him-/herself as completely engaged in seeking ''jouissance'', one of his/her aims is to make the law present. Lacan uses the term père-version, to demonstrate the way in which the pervert appeals to the father to fulfil the paternal function.<br />
<br />
=====Practice=====<br />
The [[practice]] of [[psychoanalysis]] examines the different ways and means the subject uses to produce ''jouissance''. It is by means of the bien dire, the well-spoken, where the subject comes to speak in a new way, a way of speaking the truth, that a different distribution of ''jouissance'' may be achieved. The analytic act is a cut, a break with a certain mode of ''jouissance'' fixed in the fantasy. The consequent crossing of the fantasy leaves the subject having to endure being alone with his/her own ''jouissance'' and to encounter its operation in the drive, a unique, singular way of being alone with one's own ''jouissance''. The cut of the analytic act leaves the subject having to make his/her own something that was formerly alien. This produces a new stance in relation to ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
=====Psychosis=====<br />
In [[psychosis]], ''jouissance'' is reintroduced in the place of the Other. The ''jouissance'' involved here is called ''jouissance'' of the Other, because ''jouissance'' is sacrificed to the Other, often in the most mutilating ways, like cutting off a piece of the body as an offering to what is believed to be the command of the Other to be completed. The body is not emptied of ''jouissance'' via the effect of the signifier and castration, which usually operate to exteriorise ''jouissance'' and give order to the drives.<br />
<br />
In [[Schreber]] we see the manifestation of the ways in which the body is not emptied of ''jouissance''. Shreber describes a body invaded by a ''jouissance'' that is ascribed to the ''jouissance'' of the Other, the ''jouissance'' of God. <br />
<br />
The practice of psychoanalysis with the psychotic differs from that of the neurotic. Given that the psychotic is in the position of the object of the Other's ''jouissance'', where the Uncontrolled action of the death drive lies, what is aimed at is the modification of this position in regard to the ''jouissance'' in the structure. This involves an effort to link in a chain, the isolated, persecuting signifiers in order to initiate a place for the subject outside the ''jouissance'' of the Other. Psychoanalysis attempts to modify the effect of the Other's ''jouissance'' in the body, according to the shift of the subject in the structure. The psychotic does not escape the structure, but there can be a modification of unlimited, deadly ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
''Jouissance'', or enjoyment, does not equate simply to pleasure. In the Freudian sense, enjoyment is located beyond the pleasure principle. In his clinical practice, Freud had already observed incidents of self-harm and the strange compulsion in certain patients to keep revisiting the very experiences that were so disturbing and traumatic for them. Th is paradoxical phenomenon of deriving a kind of satisfaction through suffering, or pleasure through pain, is what Lacan designates as ''jouissance''. If pleasure functions in terms of balance, achieving discrete objectives and so on, enjoyment is destabilizing and tends towards excess. Enjoyment can be characterized as a kind of existential electricity that not only animates the subject but also threatens to destroy them. In this regard, enjoyment is always both before and beyond the symbolic field; it drives the symbolic but can never be fully captured by it. If the body of Frankenstein’s monster is the intelligible symbolic structure, then lightning is the raw substance of enjoyment that reflects the primordial character of human drives and obsessions.<br />
<br />
According to Lacan, jouissance has a Real status and is the only “substance” recognized in psychoanalysis. Indeed, a central goal of psychoanalysis is not so much to bring to light the “guilt” of the analysand but rather to get at their “perverse enjoyment” (''SVII'': 4–5): the excessive forms of investment in guilt that are themselves symptomatic of a particular mode of ''jouissance'' rooted in the Real. This is why Lacan characterizes the [[superego]] – the inherent agency of guilt that constantly recycles feelings of inadequacy and makes impossible demands of the subject – in terms of a primary injunction: namely, enjoy! (''SXX'': 3).<br />
<br />
Although ''jouissance'' is viewed as a (non-discursive) “substance”, it is not one that possesses any independence or positivity of its own. ''Jouissance'' is something that can be signposted only in relation to a limit imposed by the pleasure principle (''SXVII'': 46). It emerges as a beyond in relation to this limit – as that which marks the domain of forbidden and/or obscene excesses. To approach this from a different angle, ''jouissance'' is produced as the excess of repression; without this repression, there can be no jouissance (''LN'': 308). This is why ''jouissance'' cannot be directly targeted or apprehended (despite the ambition of the “politics of enjoyment” and its various incarnations). At the same time, it cannot be directly eliminated. ''Jouissance'' is something that always sticks to the subject.<br />
<br />
David Fincher’s ''Seven'' is illustrative of the dynamics of ''jouissance''. Two detectives, Mills and Somerset, set out to investigate a series of brutal murders committed as a “sermon” on the seven deadly sins by John Doe. Doe’s victims are chosen on the grounds that they embody a particular sinful excess and are subsequently dispatched in an elaborately sadistic manner. He seeks to punishexecute his victims not because of any legal transgression but because they do not conform to the imaginary unity, the homeostatic ego-ideal, of a God-fearing community. Here we might say that Doe becomes a superego manifestation who acts beyond the law on behalf of the law, fi lling in for its failures (something similar could be said about Batman and various other super(ego)-heroes).<br />
<br />
There are two especially perceptive insights in this film. The first concerns the intrinsic character of ''jouissance'': the more Doe renounces earthly pleasures in pursuit of his cause, the more his enjoyment-in-renunciation is revealed. What Doe attempts to conceal is precisely the surplus enjoyment he takes in personal sacrifice and in stoically carrying out his duty. His enjoyment is not so much an immediate gratification in violence, but rather an obscene satisfaction in carrying out complicated and ritualized killings/torture as part of a divine mission sanctioned by God. Doe is, in fact, a classic pervert who tries to hide his enjoyment behind his perceived ethical obligation. Put in other terms, he expresses the classic ideological alibi: “I was not there as a being of enjoyment but as a functionary of duty.” This also reflects Žižek’s point against [[Hannah Arendt]] and her conclusion regarding the routinized nature of the extermination of Jews as a “banality of evil” (Arendt 1963). That is to say, what Arendt misses is the way in which the bureaucratization itself became “a source of an additional jouissance” (''PF'': 55); a surplus satisfaction gained from carrying out the daily torture and humiliations in the guise of a [[Kantianism|Kantian]] sense of impersonal duty, as an instrument of the Other’s will (the law/state/universal mission, etc.). The essence of the matter is not so much the “banality of evil”, but rather the evil/excessive ''jouissance'' contained and nurtured within the banality itself.<br />
<br />
The second concerns the way in which Doe inscribes himself in his “sermon”. At the denouement of the film, Mills learns of his wife’s murder (her decapitated head is delivered in a package) and is consequently seized by the sin of wrath: he “over-kills” Doe in an act of desperate rage. Prior to this, Doe confesses to a powerful envy of Mills and his married life. By declaring (and demonstrating) this excess, Doe stages his own execution and literally enjoys himself to death – thus completing the circle.<br />
<br />
From a Lacanian perspective, what this reflects is the way in which ''jouissance'' functions in terms of its “[[extimacy]]”. Extimacy is a hybrid word that combines the terms exteriority and intimacy. For Lacan it refers to “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (''SVII'': 71). It is along these lines that [[Jacques-Alain Miller]] affirms that the hatred of the Other’s enjoyment is ultimately a hatred of our own enjoyment (Miller 2008). The image of the Other’s enjoyment is so compelling precisely because it symbolizes the Lacanian “in us more than ourselves”. In this sense, the Other is always someone who gives body to the very excess of enjoyment that in our innermost being denies us homeostasis. What ''jouissance'' bears witness to is not the unbearable difference of the Other but, on the contrary, an unbearable sameness – that is, the very fascination with (the projected sense of) the Other’s enjoyment draws the subject into too close a proximity with their own disturbing excesses.<br />
<br />
In this context, we should read Doe’s confession as fake. His real “sin” is not envy but denial. What he denies is that his entire economy of righteous retribution is driven by enjoyment. His confession functions precisely as a way of sustaining this economy at a safe distance from any direct encounter with his traumatic excesses. By sacrificing himself, he is able to avoid any confrontation with his mode of private enjoyment – it is the opposite of what Lacan means by an act. We see a similar type of logic at play in the phenomenon of stalking. In their [[over-identification]] with their [[object of desire]] (often a celebrity), the stalker is drawn into an unbearable proximity with their excesses (the anxiety generated by their obsessional economy), which they then try to resolve through an act of severance – suicide, an assault on the target of their obsession, and so on.<br />
<br />
[[Ideology]] derives its potency from its ability to manipulate economies of enjoyment. Th rough its repressive mechanisms, the social order relies upon a certain renunciation, or loss, of enjoyment. But as Lacan points out, this enjoyment is not something that was previously possessed; it is an epiphenomenal excess of social repression itself. Where ideology succeeds is in fantasmatically translating this sense of lost enjoyment into the theft of enjoyment (Miller 2008). From a racist perspective, the immigrant is someone with perverse forms of excessive enjoyment (they are idlers living off “our” state benefits and they work too hard, taking “our” jobs, etc.) and who thereby steals and/or corrupts our enjoyment (our “way of life”). And thus what “we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us” (''TN'': 203).<br />
<br />
At the same time, ideology “bribes” the subject into accepting repression/renunciation by providing subliminal access to a surplus enjoyment – that is, an extra enjoyment generated through the renunciation of enjoyment itself (''TN'': 308–9). What is manifest in fascism, for example, is the way in which the subject derives surplus enjoyment through acts of sacrifice (renouncing personal enjoyment) in the name of doing one’s duty to the nation. With today’s (Western) ideology – basically a capitalist fatalism (“the economy is what it is”) in support of private pleasures – the subject is bribed in a different way. Ideology no longer operates simply with a particular utopian vision or with definitive objectives. Contemporary ideology consists rather in assigning demands for change to the realm of “impossibility” (as so much “ideological fantasy”). What ideology offers the subject is the fantasy of change (“freedom of choice”, “opportunities”, etc.) precisely as a means of avoiding any real (or Real) change. Change is sustained as a fantasmatic abstraction in order to prevent (the fear of) any traumatic loss of enjoyment. We see this type of ideological operation in films like ''Bruce Almighty'' where the hero actually becomes God, capable of anything, but whose own world falls apart as a result – and so he returns to a more humble “mature” existence.<br />
<br />
One of the central lessons of psychoanalysis is that while enjoyment is experienced as Real, it is ultimately an empty spectre, a kind of anamorphic effect of symbolic circumscription. Against its numerous ideological manipulations, we need to find ways of accepting, and living with, this traumatic knowledge. Extemporizing on an old Marxist maxim, when it comes to ''jouissance'' we have nothing to lose but the myth of loss itself.<br />
<br />
==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Borromean knot]]<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Death drive]]<br />
* [[Drive]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Desire]]<br />
* [[Ethics]]<br />
* [[Imaginary]]<br />
* [[Law]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Libido]]<br />
* [[Mother]]<br />
* [[Neurosis]]<br />
* [[Oedipus complex]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Perversion]]<br />
* [[Phallus]]<br />
* [[Pleasure principle]]<br />
* [[Psychosis]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Structure]]<br />
* [[Super-ego]]<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<div style="font-size:11px" class="references-small"><br />
<references /><br />
* Freud, S. (1951) [1905] 'The Three Essays on Sexuality'. S.E. 7: pp. 125-244. In: Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.<br />
* Freud, S. (1951) Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. S.E. I0: pp. 153-319.<br />
* Freud, S. (1951) [1920] Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E. I8: pp. 3-64.<br />
* Lacan, J. (1970) 'Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever' in The Structuralist ''Jouissance'' 109 Controversy, Richard Macksay and Eugenio Donato (eds). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 194. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1975) Seminar XX, Encore (1972-73). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, p. 10. Now translated by Bruce Fink (1998) under the title of On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge I972-1973, Encore. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 3. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1958) 'The youth of A. Gide', April, 1958; `The signification of the phallus', May, 1958; 'On the theory of symbolism in Ernest Jones', March, 1959, in Écrits. Paris: Seuil. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1977) [1960]. 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious' in Écrits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: W.W. Norton. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1990) Television. New York: W.W. Norton. (note 5), p. 325. Carmela Levy-Stokes<br />
</div><br />
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{{OK}}<br />
[[Category:Real]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek_Dictonary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Jouissance&diff=43761Jouissance2019-04-15T02:08:24Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div><!-- <br />
{| align="right" style="line-height:2.0em;text-align:right;background-color:#fcfcfc;border:1px solid #aaa" <br />
| [[English]]: ''[[enjoyment]]''<br />
|}<br />
--><br />
==Translation==<br />
===Enjoyment===<br />
''[[Jouissance]]'', and the corresponding verb, ''[[jouir]]'', refer to an extreme [[pleasure]]. It is not possible to translate this French word, ''jouissance'', precisely. Sometimes it is translated as '[[enjoyment]]', but enjoyment has a reference to pleasure, and ''jouissance'' is an enjoyment that always has a deadly reference, a paradoxical pleasure, reaching an almost intolerable level of excitation. Due to the specificity of the French term, it is usually left untranslated.<br />
<br />
<!-- There is no adequate translation in [[English]] of the word ''[[jouissance]]''.<ref>It is therefore left untranslated in most English editions of [[Lacan]].</ref> "[[Enjoyment]]" does convey the sense, contained in ''[[jouissance]]'', of ''enjoyment of rights'', of ''property'', etc., but it lacks the ''sexual connotations'' of the [[French]] word. (''Jouir'' is slang for "to come".) --><br />
<!-- But it also refers to those moments when too much pleasure is pain. --><br />
<!-- The term signifies the ecstatic or orgasmic [[enjoyment]] - and exquisite [[pain]] - of something or someone. In [[French]], ''[[jouissance]]'' includes the [[enjoyment]] of rights and property, but also the slang verb, ''[[jouissance|jouir]]'', to come, and so is related to the [[pleasure]] of the [[sexual relationship|sexual act]].--> <br />
<br />
===Pleasure===<br />
<!-- Lacan develops this opposition in 1960, in the context of his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. --><br />
<!-- In 1960 [[Lacan]] develops an opposition --><br />
[[Lacan]] makes an important distinction between ''[[jouissance]]'' and ''[[plaisir]]'' ([[pleasure]]). [[Pleasure]] obeys the [[law]] of homeostasis that [[Freud]] evokes in ''[[Beyond the Pleasure Principle]]'', whereby, through discharge, the [[psyche]] seeks the lowest possible level of tension. The [[pleasure principle]] thus functions as a limit imposed on [[enjoyment]]; it commands the [[subject]] to "enjoy as little as possible." ''[[Jouissance]]'' transgresses this [[law]] and, in that respect, it is ''beyond'' the [[pleasure principle]].<br />
<!-- ''[[Jouissance]]'' goes beyond ''[[plaisir]]''. --><br />
<!-- However, the result of transgressing the [[pleasure principle]] is not more [[pleasure]], but pain, since there is only a certain amount of [[pleasure]] that the [[subject]] can bear. Beyond this limit, [[pleasure]] becomes [[pain]], and this "painful pleasure" is what [[Lacan]] calls ''[[jouissance]]''. "''Jouissance'' is suffering."<ref>{{S7}} p. 184</ref> The term ''[[jouissance]]'' thus nicely expresses the paradoxical [[satisfaction]] that the [[subject]] derives from his [[symptom]], or, to put it another way, the suffering that he derives from his on [[satisfaction]]. --><br />
<br />
<!-- ==Masochism== There is an important difference between [[masochism]] and [[jouissance]]. In [[masochism]], [[pain]] is a means to [[pleasure]]; [[pleasure]] is taken in the very fact of [[pain|suffering]] itself, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish [[pleasure]] from [[pain]]. With ''[[jouissance]]'', on the other hand, [[pleasure]] and [[pain]] remain distinct; no [[pleasure]] is taken in the [[pain]] itself, but the [[pleasure]] cannot be obtained without paying the price of [[pain|suffering]]. It is thus a kind of ''deal'' in which "[[pleasure]] ''and'' [[pain]] are presented as a single packet."<ref>Seminar of 27 February 1963. J. Lacan, The Seminar. Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. p. 189.</ref> --><br />
<br />
<!-- <blockquote>"Castration means that ''jouissance'' must be refused so that it can be reached on the inverted ladder (''l'échelle renversée'') of the Law of desire."<ref>{{E}} p. 324</ref></blockquote> --><br />
The [[symbolic]] [[prohibition]] of [[enjoyment]] in the [[Oedipus complex]] (the [[incest]] [[taboo]]) is thus, paradoxically, the [[prohibition]] of something which is already impossible; its function is therefore to sustain the [[neurotic]] [[illusion]] that [[enjoyment]] would be attainable if it were not forbidden. The very prohibition creates the [[desire]] to transgress it, and ''[[jouissance]]'' is therefore fundamentally transgressive.<ref>{{S7}} Ch. 15</ref><br />
<br />
==Development==<br />
===Sigmund Freud===<br />
=====Death Drive=====<br />
The [[death drive]] is the name given to that constant [[desire]] in the [[subject]] to break through the [[pleasure principle]] towards the [[Thing]] and a certain [[surplus|excess]] ''[[jouissance]]''; thus ''[[jouissance]]'' is "the path towards death".<ref>{{S17}} p. 17</ref><br />
<br />
Insofar as the [[drive]]s are attempts to break through the [[pleasure principle]] in search of ''[[jouissance]]'', every [[drive]] is a [[death drive]].<br />
<br />
===Jacques Lacan===<br />
====1953 - 1960====<br />
=====Master-Slave Dialectic=====<br />
''Jouissance'' is not a central preoccupation during the first part of<br />
Lacan's teaching. ''Jouissance'' appears in Lacan's work in the [[seminars]] of [[Seminar I|1953-54]] and [[Seminar II|1954-55]], and is referred to in some other works (''[[Écrits]]'', 1977). In these early years ''[[jouissance]]'' is not elaborated in any [[structure|structural sense]], the reference being mainly to [[Hegel]] and the [[master—slave]] [[dialectic]], where the [[slave]] must facilitate the [[master]]'s ''jouissance'' through his work in producing objects for the master.<br />
<br />
=====Sexual Reference=====<br />
From 1957 the sexual reference of ''jouissance'' as orgasm emerges into the foreground. This is the more popular use of the term ''jouissance'', with ''jouir'' meaning `to come'.<br />
<br />
=====''The Ethics of Psychoanalysis''=====<br />
In his [[seminar]] of [[Seminar VII|1959-60]], [[Seminar VII|The Ethics of Psychoanalysis]], Lacan deals for the first time with the [[Real]] and ''jouissance''. Although the [[Real]] of the 1960s is not the same as his use of the Real in the 1980s, the first concepts emerge in this seminar. Here ''jouissance'' is considered in its function of [[evil]], that which is ascribed to a neighbour, but which dwells in the most intimate part of the [[subject]], [[extimate|intimate]] and [[alienated]] at the same time, as it is that from which the [[subject]] flees, experiencing [[aggression]] at the very approach of an encounter with his/her own ''jouissance''. The chapters in this seminar address such concepts as the ''jouissance'' of [[transgression]] and the paradox of ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
====1960s====<br />
=====Symbolic Castration=====<br />
It is in the text '[[The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious]]' that a [[structure|structural]] account of ''jouissance'' is first given in connection with the [[subject]]'s entry into the [[symbolic]] (Lacan, 1977).<br />
<br />
The [[speaking]] [[being]] has to use the [[signifier]], which comes from the [[Other]]. This has an effect of cutting any notion of a complete ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. The [[signifier]] forbids the ''jouissance'' of the [[body]] of the Other. Complete ''jouissance'' is thus [[forbidden]] to the one who speaks, that is, to all speaking beings. This refers to a loss of ''jouissance'' which is a necessity for those who use [[language]] and are a product of language. This is a reference to [[castration]], [[castration]] of ''jouissance'', a [[lack]] of ''jouissance'' that is constituent of the [[subject]]. This loss of ''jouissance'' is a loss of the ''jouissance'' which is presumed to be possible with the [[Other]], but which is, in fact, lost from the beginning. The myth of a primary experience of satisfaction is an illusion to cover the fact that all satisfaction is marked by a loss in relation to a supposed initial, complete satisfaction. The primary effect of the [[signifier]] is the [[repression]] of [[the thing]] where we suppose full ''jouissance'' to be. Once the signifier is there, ''jouissance'' is not there so completely. And it is only because of the signifier, whose impact cuts and forces an expenditure of ''jouissance'' from the body, that it is possible to enjoy what remains, or is left over from this evacuating. What cannot be evacuated via the signifying operation remains as a ''jouissance'' around the [[erotogenic zones]], that to which the [[drive]] is articulated.<br />
<br />
What is left over after this negativization (—) of ''jouissance'' occurs at two levels. At one level, ''jouissance'' is redistributed outside the [[body]] in [[speech]], and there is thus a ''jouissance'' of [[speech]] itself, out-of-the-body ''jouissance''. On another level, at the level of the [[lost object]], [[object a]], there is a plus (+), a little compensation in the form of what is allowed of ''jouissance'', a compensation for the minus of the loss which has occurred in the forbidding of ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]].<br />
<br />
=====Symbolic Prohibition=====<br />
The [[prohibition]] of ''[[jouissance]]'' (the [[pleasure principle]]) is inherent in the [[symbolic]] [[structure]] of [[language]], which is why "''jouissance'' is forbidden to him who speaks, as such."<ref>{{E}} p. 319</ref> The [[subject]]'s entry into the [[symbolic]] is conditional upon a certain initial [[renunciation]] of ''[[jouissance]]'' in the [[castration complex]], when the [[subject]] gives up his attempts to be the [[imaginary]] [[phallus]] for the [[mother]].<br />
<br />
=====Law and Prohibition=====<br />
The [[Freud]]ian [[Oedipus]] refers to the [[father]] prohibiting access to the [[mother]], that is, the [[law]] prohibiting ''jouissance''. Lacan refers not only to a ''jouissance'' forbidden to the one who speaks, but the impossibility in the very [[structure]] itself of such a ''jouissance'', that is, a lack of ''jouissance'' in the essential of the [[structure]]. Thus, what is prohibited is, in fact, already impossible.<br />
<br />
=====''Plus-de jouir''=====<br />
The [[lack]] in the [[signifying order]], a [[lack]] in the [[Other]], which designates a lack of ''jouissance'', creates a place where lost objects come, standing in for the missing ''jouissance'' and creating a link between the signifying order and ''jouissance''. What is allowed of ''jouissance'' is in the [[surplus]] ''jouissance'' connected with [[object a]]. Here ''jouissance'' is embodied in the lost object. Although this object is lost and cannot be appropriated, it does restore a certain coefficient of ''jouissance''. This can be seen in the subject repeating him-/herself with his/her surplus ''jouissance'', ''[[plus-de jouir]]'', in the push of the [[drive]].<br />
<br />
=====Drive=====<br />
''[[Plus-de jouir]]'' can mean both more and no more; hence the ambiguity, both more ''jouir'' and no more ''jouir''. The [[drive]] turning around this lost object attempts to capture something of the lost ''jouissance''. This it fails to do, there is always a loss in the circuit of the drive, but there is a ''jouissance'' in the very [[repetition]] of this movement around the [[object a]], which it produces as a ''[[plus-de jouir]]''. In this structural approach, there is a structuring function of lack itself, and the loss of the primordial object of ''jouissance'' comes to operate as a cause, as seen in the function of [[object a]], the ''[[plus-de jouir]]''.<br />
<br />
=====Desire=====<br />
''Jouissance'' is denoted, in these years, in its [[dialectic]] with [[desire]]. Unrecognised [[desire]] brings the [[subject]] closer to a destructive ''jouissance'', which is often followed by retreat. This destructive ''jouissance'' has a Freudian illustration in the account of the case of the [[Ratman]], of whom Freud notes `the horror of a pleasure of which he was unaware' (Freud, S.E. 10, pp. 167-8).<br />
<br />
====1970s====<br />
[[Seminar XX]], [[Encore]], given in 1972-73, further elaborates Lacan's ideas on ''jouissance'' already outlined, and goes further with another aspect of ''jouissance'', ''[[feminine jouissance]]'', also known as the ''[[Other jouissance]]''. <br />
<br />
The speaking being is alone with his/her ''jouissance'' as it is not possible to share the ''jouissance'' of the Other. The axiom that Lacan has already given in earlier seminars, [[there is no sexual rapport]], comes to the foreground in Encore as male and female coming from a very different ''jouissance''; different and not complementary. It is a difference in the relation of the speaking being to ''jouissance'' which determines his being man or woman, not anatomical difference.<br />
<br />
=====Phallic ''Jouissance''=====<br />
Sexual ''jouissance'' is specified as an impasse. It is not what will allow a man and a woman to be joined. Sexual ''jouissance'' can follow no other path than that of [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' that has to pass through [[speech]]. The ''jouissance'' of man is produced by the [[structure]] of the [[signifier]], and is known as [[phallic]] ''jouissance''. The [[structure]] of [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' is the [[structure]] of the [[signifier]]. Lacan proposes a precise definition of man as being subject to [[castration]] and lacking a part of ''jouissance'', that which is required in order to use [[speech]]. All of man is subjected to the [[signifier]]. Man cannot relate directly with the [[Other]]. His partner is thus not the Other sex but an object, a piece of the body. Man looks for a little surplus ''jouissance'', that linked with object a, which has phallic value.<br />
<br />
The erotics embodied in [[object a]] is the ''jouissance'' that belongs to fantasy, aiming at a piece of the [[body]], and creating an illusion of a union linking the subject with a specific object. The ''jouissance'' of man is thus phallic ''jouissance'' together with surplus ''jouissance''. This is linked to his ideas of the 1960s outlined above. <br />
<br />
=====Other ''Jouissance''=====<br />
[[Woman]] is [[phallic]] ''jouissance'' with something more, a supplementary ''jouissance''. There is no universal definition of woman. Every woman must pass, like man, through the signifier. However, not all of woman is subjected to the signifier. Woman thus has the possibility of the experience of a ''jouissance'' which is not altogether phallic. This Other ''jouissance'', another kind of satisfaction, has to do with the relation to the Other and is not supported by the object and fantasy. <br />
<br />
Increasingly, in his works of the 1970s, Lacan points to the fact that language, in addition to having a signifier effect, also has an effect of ''jouissance''. In [[Television]], he equivocates between ''jouissance'', ''jouis-sens'' (enjoyment in sense) and the ''jouissance'' effect, the enjoyment of one's own unconscious, even if it is through pain (Lacan, 1990). The [[unconscious]] is emphasized as enjoyment playing through substitution, with ''jouissance'' located in the jargon itself. ''Jouissance'' thus refers to the specific way in which each subject enjoys his/her unconscious. <br />
<br />
=====''Lalangue''=====<br />
The motor of the unconscious ''jouissance'' is ''lalangue'', also described as babbling or mother tongue. The unconscious is made of ''lalangue''. Lacan writes it as ''lalangue'' to show that language always intervenes in the form of lallation or mother tongue and that the unconscious is a `knowing how to do things' with ''lalangue''. The practice of psychoanalysis, which promotes free association, aims to cut through the apparent coherent, complete system of language in order to emphasize the inconsistencies and holes with which the speaking being has to deal. The ''lalangue'' of the unconscious, that which blurts out when least expected, provides a ''jouissance'' in its very play. Every ''lalangue'' is unique to a subject. <br />
<br />
''Jouis-sens'' also refers to the [[super-ego]]'s [[demand]] to enjoy, a cruel imperative - enjoy! - that the subject will never be able to satisfy. The super-ego promotes the ''jouissance'' that it simultaneously prohibits. The Freudian reference to the super-ego is one of a paradoxical functioning, secretly feeding on the very satisfaction that it commands to be renounced. The severity of the super-ego is therefore a vehicle for ''jouissance''.<br />
<br />
In '[[La Troisième]]', presented in Rome in 1974 (Écrits, 1977), Lacan elaborates the third ''jouissance'', jouis-sens, the ''jouissance'' of meaning, the ''jouissance'' of the unconscious, in reference to its locus in the [[Borromean knot]]. He locates the three ''jouissance''s in relation to the intersections of the three circles of the knot, the circles of the [[Real]], the [[Symbolic]] and the [[Imaginary]]. The Borromean knot is a topos in which the logical and clinical dimensions of the three ''jouissance''s are linked together: the Other ''jouissance'', that is the ''jouissance'' of the body, is located at the intersection of the Real and the Imaginary; phallic ''jouissance'' is situated within the common space of the Symbolic and the Real; the ''jouissance'' of meaning, jouis-sens, is located at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic. It is the [[object a]] that holds the central, irreducible place between the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary.<br />
<br />
=====Feminine ''Jouissance''=====<br />
<!-- There are strong affinitites between [[Lacan]]'s concept of ''[[jouissance]]'' and [[Freud]]'s concept of the [[libido]], as is clear from [[Lacan]]'s description of ''[[jouissance]]'' as a "bodily substance."<ref>{{S20}} p. 26</ref> In keeping with [[Freud]]'s assertion that there is only one [[libido]], which is [[masculine]], [[Lacan]] states that ''[[jouissance]]'' is essentially [[phallic]]; <blockquote>''Jouissance'', insofar as it is sexual, is phallic, which means that it does not relate to the Other as such."<ref>{{S20}} p. 14</ref></blockquote> <br />
However, in 1973 [[Lacan]] admits that there is a specifically [[feminine]] ''[[jouissance]]'', a "supplementary ''jouissance''"<ref>{{S20}} p. 58</ref> which is "beyond the phallus,"<ref>{{S20}} p. 69</ref> a ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. This [[jouissance|feminine jouissance]] is ineffable, for [[women]] experience it but know nothing about it.<ref>{{S20}} p. 71</ref> In order to differentiate between these two forms of ''[[jouissance]]'', [[Lacan]] introduces different [[algebra|algebraic]] [[symbol]]s for each; '''Jφ''' designates [[phallus|phallic ''jouissance'']], whereas '''JA''' designates the ''[[jouissance]]'' of the [[Other]]. --><br />
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[[Lacan]] states that "''[[jouissance]]'', insofar as it is sexual, is [[phallus|phallic]], which means that it does not relate to the Other as such."<ref>{{S20}} p. 14</ref> However, he argues that there is a specifically [[feminine]] ''[[jouissance]]'', a "supplementary ''jouissance''"<ref>{{S20}} p. 58</ref> which is "beyond the phallus,"<ref>{{S20}} p. 69</ref> a ''jouissance'' of the [[Other]]. In order to differentiate between these two forms of ''[[jouissance]]'', [[Lacan]] introduces different [[algebra|algebraic]] [[symbol]]s for each; '''Jφ''' designates [[phallus|phallic ''jouissance'']], whereas '''JA''' designates the ''[[jouissance]]'' of the [[Other]].<br />
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<!-- ==Master and Slave==<br />
In the [[seminars]] of 1953-4 and 1954-5 [[Lacan]] uses the term occasionally, usually in the context of the [[Hegel]]ian [[dialectic]] of the [[master]] and the [[slave]]: the [[slave]] is forced to work to provide objects for the [[master]]'s [[enjoyment]] (''[[jouissance]]'').<ref>{{S1}} p. 223; {{S2}} p. 269</ref> --><br />
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==''Jouissance'' and the Clinic==<br />
Lacan's contribution to the clinic is paramount in regard to the operation of ''jouissance'' in neurosis, perversion and psychosis. The three structures can be viewed as strategies with respect to dealing with ''jouissance''.<br />
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=====Neurosis=====<br />
The [[neurotic]] [[subject]] does not want to sacrifice his/her castration to the ''jouissance'' of the Other (Écrits, 1977). It is an imaginary castration that is clung to in order not to have to acknowledge Symbolic castration, the subjection to language and its consequent loss of ''jouissance''. The neurotic subject asks 'why me, that I have to sacrifice this castration, this piece of flesh, to the Other?' Here we encounter the neurotic belief that it would be possible to attain a complete ''jouissance'' if it were not forbidden and if it were not for some Other who is demanding his/her castration. Instead of seeing the lack in the Other the neurotic sees the Other's demand of him/her. <br />
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=====Perversion=====<br />
The [[Pervert]] imagines him-/herself to be the Other in order to ensure his/her ''jouissance''. The perverse subject makes him-/herself the instrument of the Other's ''jouissance'' through putting the object a in the place of the barred Other, negating the Other as subject. His/her ''jouissance'' comes from placing him-/herself as an object in order to procure the ''jouissance'' of a phallus, even though he/she doesn't know to whom this phallus belongs. Although the pervert presents him-/herself as completely engaged in seeking ''jouissance'', one of his/her aims is to make the law present. Lacan uses the term père-version, to demonstrate the way in which the pervert appeals to the father to fulfil the paternal function.<br />
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=====Practice=====<br />
The [[practice]] of [[psychoanalysis]] examines the different ways and means the subject uses to produce ''jouissance''. It is by means of the bien dire, the well-spoken, where the subject comes to speak in a new way, a way of speaking the truth, that a different distribution of ''jouissance'' may be achieved. The analytic act is a cut, a break with a certain mode of ''jouissance'' fixed in the fantasy. The consequent crossing of the fantasy leaves the subject having to endure being alone with his/her own ''jouissance'' and to encounter its operation in the drive, a unique, singular way of being alone with one's own ''jouissance''. The cut of the analytic act leaves the subject having to make his/her own something that was formerly alien. This produces a new stance in relation to ''jouissance''.<br />
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=====Psychosis=====<br />
In [[psychosis]], ''jouissance'' is reintroduced in the place of the Other. The ''jouissance'' involved here is called ''jouissance'' of the Other, because ''jouissance'' is sacrificed to the Other, often in the most mutilating ways, like cutting off a piece of the body as an offering to what is believed to be the command of the Other to be completed. The body is not emptied of ''jouissance'' via the effect of the signifier and castration, which usually operate to exteriorise ''jouissance'' and give order to the drives.<br />
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In [[Schreber]] we see the manifestation of the ways in which the body is not emptied of ''jouissance''. Shreber describes a body invaded by a ''jouissance'' that is ascribed to the ''jouissance'' of the Other, the ''jouissance'' of God. <br />
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The practice of psychoanalysis with the psychotic differs from that of the neurotic. Given that the psychotic is in the position of the object of the Other's ''jouissance'', where the Uncontrolled action of the death drive lies, what is aimed at is the modification of this position in regard to the ''jouissance'' in the structure. This involves an effort to link in a chain, the isolated, persecuting signifiers in order to initiate a place for the subject outside the ''jouissance'' of the Other. Psychoanalysis attempts to modify the effect of the Other's ''jouissance'' in the body, according to the shift of the subject in the structure. The psychotic does not escape the structure, but there can be a modification of unlimited, deadly ''jouissance''.<br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
''Jouissance'', or enjoyment, does not equate simply to pleasure. In the Freudian sense, enjoyment is located beyond the pleasure principle. In his clinical practice, Freud had already observed incidents of self-harm and the strange compulsion in certain patients to keep revisiting the very experiences that were so disturbing and traumatic for them. Th is paradoxical phenomenon of deriving a kind of satisfaction through suffering, or pleasure through pain, is what Lacan designates as ''jouissance''. If pleasure functions in terms of balance, achieving discrete objectives and so on, enjoyment is destabilizing and tends towards excess. Enjoyment can be characterized as a kind of existential electricity that not only animates the subject but also threatens to destroy them. In this regard, enjoyment is always both before and beyond the symbolic field; it drives the symbolic but can never be fully captured by it. If the body of Frankenstein’s monster is the intelligible symbolic structure, then lightning is the raw substance of enjoyment that reflects the primordial character of human drives and obsessions.<br />
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According to Lacan, jouissance has a Real status and is the only “substance” recognized in psychoanalysis. Indeed, a central goal of psychoanalysis is not so much to bring to light the “guilt” of the analysand but rather to get at their “perverse enjoyment” (''SVII'': 4–5): the excessive forms of investment in guilt that are themselves symptomatic of a particular mode of ''jouissance'' rooted in the Real. This is why Lacan characterizes the [[superego]] – the inherent agency of guilt that constantly recycles feelings of inadequacy and makes impossible demands of the subject – in terms of a primary injunction: namely, enjoy! (''SXX'': 3).<br />
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Although ''jouissance'' is viewed as a (non-discursive) “substance”, it is not one that possesses any independence or positivity of its own. ''Jouissance'' is something that can be signposted only in relation to a limit imposed by the pleasure principle (''SXVII'': 46). It emerges as a beyond in relation to this limit – as that which marks the domain of forbidden and/or obscene excesses. To approach this from a different angle, ''jouissance'' is produced as the excess of repression; without this repression, there can be no jouissance (''LN'': 308). This is why ''jouissance'' cannot be directly targeted or apprehended (despite the ambition of the “politics of enjoyment” and its various incarnations). At the same time, it cannot be directly eliminated. ''Jouissance'' is something that always sticks to the subject.<br />
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David Fincher’s ''Seven'' is illustrative of the dynamics of ''jouissance''. Two detectives, Mills and Somerset, set out to investigate a series of brutal murders committed as a “sermon” on the seven deadly sins by John Doe. Doe’s victims are chosen on the grounds that they embody a particular sinful excess and are subsequently dispatched in an elaborately sadistic manner. He seeks to punishexecute his victims not because of any legal transgression but because they do not conform to the imaginary unity, the homeostatic ego-ideal, of a God-fearing community. Here we might say that Doe becomes a superego manifestation who acts beyond the law on behalf of the law, fi lling in for its failures (something similar could be said about Batman and various other super(ego)-heroes).<br />
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There are two especially perceptive insights in this film. The first concerns the intrinsic character of ''jouissance'': the more Doe renounces earthly pleasures in pursuit of his cause, the more his enjoyment-in-renunciation is revealed. What Doe attempts to conceal is precisely the surplus enjoyment he takes in personal sacrifice and in stoically carrying out his duty. His enjoyment is not so much an immediate gratification in violence, but rather an obscene satisfaction in carrying out complicated and ritualized killings/torture as part of a divine mission sanctioned by God. Doe is, in fact, a classic pervert who tries to hide his enjoyment behind his perceived ethical obligation. Put in other terms, he expresses the classic ideological alibi: “I was not there as a being of enjoyment but as a functionary of duty.” This also reflects Žižek’s point against [[Hannah Arendt]] and her conclusion regarding the routinized nature of the extermination of Jews as a “banality of evil” (Arendt 1963). That is to say, what Arendt misses is the way in which the bureaucratization itself became “a source of an additional jouissance” (''PF'': 55); a surplus satisfaction gained from carrying out the daily torture and humiliations in the guise of a [[Kantianism|Kantian]] sense of impersonal duty, as an instrument of the Other’s will (the law/state/universal mission, etc.). The essence of the matter is not so much the “banality of evil”, but rather the evil/excessive ''jouissance'' contained and nurtured within the banality itself.<br />
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The second concerns the way in which Doe inscribes himself in his “sermon”. At the denouement of the film, Mills learns of his wife’s murder (her decapitated head is delivered in a package) and is consequently seized by the sin of wrath: he “over-kills” Doe in an act of desperate rage. Prior to this, Doe confesses to a powerful envy of Mills and his married life. By declaring (and demonstrating) this excess, Doe stages his own execution and literally enjoys himself to death – thus completing the circle.<br />
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From a Lacanian perspective, what this reflects is the way in which ''jouissance'' functions in terms of its “[[extimacy]]”. Extimacy is a hybrid word that combines the terms exteriority and intimacy. For Lacan it refers to “something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me” (''SVII'': 71). It is along these lines that [[Jacques-Alain Miller]] affirms that the hatred of the Other’s enjoyment is ultimately a hatred of our own enjoyment (Miller 2008). The image of the Other’s enjoyment is so compelling precisely because it symbolizes the Lacanian “in us more than ourselves”. In this sense, the Other is always someone who gives body to the very excess of enjoyment that in our innermost being denies us homeostasis. What ''jouissance'' bears witness to is not the unbearable difference of the Other but, on the contrary, an unbearable sameness – that is, the very fascination with (the projected sense of) the Other’s enjoyment draws the subject into too close a proximity with their own disturbing excesses.<br />
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In this context, we should read Doe’s confession as fake. His real “sin” is not envy but denial. What he denies is that his entire economy of righteous retribution is driven by enjoyment. His confession functions precisely as a way of sustaining this economy at a safe distance from any direct encounter with his traumatic excesses. By sacrificing himself, he is able to avoid any confrontation with his mode of private enjoyment – it is the opposite of what Lacan means by an act. We see a similar type of logic at play in the phenomenon of stalking. In their [[over-identification]] with their [[object of desire]] (often a celebrity), the stalker is drawn into an unbearable proximity with their excesses (the anxiety generated by their obsessional economy), which they then try to resolve through an act of severance – suicide, an assault on the target of their obsession, and so on.<br />
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[[Ideology]] derives its potency from its ability to manipulate economies of enjoyment. Th rough its repressive mechanisms, the social order relies upon a certain renunciation, or loss, of enjoyment. But as Lacan points out, this enjoyment is not something that was previously possessed; it is an epiphenomenal excess of social repression itself. Where ideology succeeds is in fantasmatically translating this sense of lost enjoyment into the theft of enjoyment (Miller 2008). From a racist perspective, the immigrant is someone with perverse forms of excessive enjoyment (they are idlers living off “our” state benefits and they work too hard, taking “our” jobs, etc.) and who thereby steals and/or corrupts our enjoyment (our “way of life”). And thus what “we conceal by imputing to the Other the theft of enjoyment is the traumatic fact that we never possessed what was allegedly stolen from us” (''TN'': 203).<br />
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At the same time, ideology “bribes” the subject into accepting repression/renunciation by providing subliminal access to a surplus enjoyment – that is, an extra enjoyment generated through the renunciation of enjoyment itself (''TN'': 308–9). What is manifest in fascism, for example, is the way in which the subject derives surplus enjoyment through acts of sacrifice (renouncing personal enjoyment) in the name of doing one’s duty to the nation. With today’s (Western) ideology – basically a capitalist fatalism (“the economy is what it is”) in support of private pleasures – the subject is bribed in a different way. Ideology no longer operates simply with a particular utopian vision or with definitive objectives. Contemporary ideology consists rather in assigning demands for change to the realm of “impossibility” (as so much “ideological fantasy”). What ideology offers the subject is the fantasy of change (“freedom of choice”, “opportunities”, etc.) precisely as a means of avoiding any real (or Real) change. Change is sustained as a fantasmatic abstraction in order to prevent (the fear of) any traumatic loss of enjoyment. We see this type of ideological operation in films like ''Bruce Almighty'' where the hero actually becomes God, capable of anything, but whose own world falls apart as a result – and so he returns to a more humble “mature” existence.<br />
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One of the central lessons of psychoanalysis is that while enjoyment is experienced as Real, it is ultimately an empty spectre, a kind of anamorphic effect of symbolic circumscription. Against its numerous ideological manipulations, we need to find ways of accepting, and living with, this traumatic knowledge. Extemporizing on an old Marxist maxim, when it comes to ''jouissance'' we have nothing to lose but the myth of loss itself.<br />
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==See Also==<br />
{{See}}<br />
* [[Borromean knot]]<br />
* [[Castration]]<br />
* [[Death drive]]<br />
* [[Drive]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Desire]]<br />
* [[Ethics]]<br />
* [[Imaginary]]<br />
* [[Law]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Libido]]<br />
* [[Mother]]<br />
* [[Neurosis]]<br />
* [[Oedipus complex]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Perversion]]<br />
* [[Phallus]]<br />
* [[Pleasure principle]]<br />
* [[Psychosis]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Structure]]<br />
* [[Super-ego]]<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
{{Also}}<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<div style="font-size:11px" class="references-small"><br />
<references /><br />
* Freud, S. (1951) [1905] 'The Three Essays on Sexuality'. S.E. 7: pp. 125-244. In: Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press.<br />
* Freud, S. (1951) Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis. S.E. I0: pp. 153-319.<br />
* Freud, S. (1951) [1920] Beyond the Pleasure Principle. S.E. I8: pp. 3-64.<br />
* Lacan, J. (1970) 'Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever' in The Structuralist ''Jouissance'' 109 Controversy, Richard Macksay and Eugenio Donato (eds). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 194. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1975) Seminar XX, Encore (1972-73). Text established by Jacques-Alain Miller. Paris: Seuil, p. 10. Now translated by Bruce Fink (1998) under the title of On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge I972-1973, Encore. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XX. New York: W.W. Norton, p. 3. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1958) 'The youth of A. Gide', April, 1958; `The signification of the phallus', May, 1958; 'On the theory of symbolism in Ernest Jones', March, 1959, in Écrits. Paris: Seuil. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1977) [1960]. 'The subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious' in Écrits: A Selection (trans. A. Sheridan). New York: W.W. Norton. <br />
* Lacan, J. (1990) Television. New York: W.W. Norton. (note 5), p. 325. Carmela Levy-Stokes<br />
</div><br />
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{{OK}}<br />
[[Category:Real]]<br />
[[Category:Concepts]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Economics&diff=43760Economics2019-04-15T01:57:35Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
The subject of economics enjoys a crucial, if seemingly ambiguous, place in Žižek’s oeuvre. On the one hand, Žižek has repeatedly insisted on the contemporary relevance of [[Karl Marx|Marx]]’s “critique of political economy”, positing the capitalist mode of production as the transcendental determining force of any social totality. Yet, on the other hand, Žižek’s focus on economics has been singularly defined by its thorough engagement with, and critical revision of, the theoretical problems endemic to essentialist models of economic determinism that problematically characterized a large strand of Marxist philosophy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this end, Žižek’s synthesis of Marx’s “critique of political economy” with [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]]’s psychoanalytic account of the psyche’s libidinal economy can be read as an attempt systemically to revise, and newly account for, the place the desiring subject and unconscious forms of social fantasy occupy in the social construction of capitalism’s “objective laws” of economics.<br />
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Yet despite his works’ nuanced critique of economism, this has not kept his many critics – such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Judith Butler]] – from charging Žižek with the endorsement of an implicit, albeit updated version of the same tendency. In their co-written work, ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', Laclau criticizes Žižek’s Marxist theory of capitalism for operating within “a new version of the base/superstructure model” (''CHU'': 293). According to Laclau, Žižek’s economism results from his positing “a fundamental level on which capitalism proceeds according to its own logic, undisturbed by external influences” (''ibid''.). Because he understands Žižek’s model of capitalism as a self-generated economic process that simply unfolds the logical consequences deriving from an “elementary conceptual matrix”, Laclau argues that the Žižekian theory of economics ineluctably “returns to the nineteenth-century myth of an enclosed economic space” (''CHU'': 291).<br />
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While ultimately incorrect, Laclau’s critique is not completely misplaced. Indeed, for Žižek, the capitalist economy – that is, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital” – represents far more than simply one dimension of modern life among others. As Žižek states in his essay “[[Lenin’s Choice]]”, the sphere of the economy should be grasped as “not just that of a limited empirical sphere, but [as] a kind of socio-transcendental ''[[a priori]]'', the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (''RG'': 271). Such a radically determinate viewpoint of the economy’s politically transcendent force ''vis-à-vis'' the social totality is consistent with the entirety of Žižek’s intellectual career. Indeed, in Žižek’s ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', he promotes the rather essentialist-sounding claim that “in the structure of the commodity-form, it is possible to find the transcendental subject” of society (''SO'': 16). By this, Žižek means that the abstract structure of the commodity-form (i.e. its determinate role in mediating social acts of production, exchange and consumption) should be understood not as a rationally neutral economic tool, but as a “real abstraction” – a social form of economic abstraction (i.e. exchange value embodied in money) that temporally precedes and thus objectively determines forms of modern subjectivity (''SO'': 16–30). In making such claims, Žižek follows in the theoretical footsteps of the Western Marxist tradition began by [[Georg Lukács]], who departed from the vulgar economism of the Second International during the 1920s, and for whom “the class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just [thought of as] a phenomenon limited to the particular ‘domain’ of the economy, but the [very] structuring principle that [[Overdetermination|overdetermines]] the social totality” (''CHU'': 96). Hence, Žižek claims that the “social organization of production (‘the mode of production’) is not just one among many levels of social organization, it is the site of ‘contradiction’ … which, as such, spills over into all other levels” of social reality (''LC'': 295).<br />
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As “essentialist” as these aforementioned claims appear at first glance, there exists a whole “other scene” in Žižek’s work, one that insists on precisely the opposite fact: namely, that the determinate figure of the economy is precisely “not-all”(in the Lacanian sense), not a coherent whole or totality of social existence. In this conception, the economic horizon represents not a transcendental cause, but rather a sort of social limit or “traumatic kernel”, which is expressed by the political existence of the [[class struggle]]. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek argues in this vein, stating that the “the ‘economy’ cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive ‘order of being’, precisely insofar as it is always political, insofar as political (‘class’) struggle is at its very heart” (''ET'': 198). In ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', Žižek refers to the “determining role of the economy” both as an “absent cause” and as “an ‘impotent’ pseudo-cause” of the social (''LC'': 291). According to this line of thought, “the determining role of the economy” should not, pace Žižek, be imagined as a “hidden meta-essence which then expresses itself within a two-level-distance in a cultural struggle” (''LC'': 290). Rather, as he describes it in [[Less Than Nothing|''Less Than Nothing'']]: “it [the economy] is the absent X which circulates between the multiple levels of the social field (economic, political, ideological, legal …), distributing them in their specific articulation” (''LN'': 361).<br />
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These two seemingly contradictory motifs in Žižek’s work apropos the problem of economics (i.e. “the sphere of the economy”) beg the following question: is the sphere of the economy a “transcendental logic” – that is, the fundamental basis of which other cultural phenomena of struggle (such as those of religion, race, gender and sexuality) represent a mere epiphenomenal expression? The first way to resolve this apparent ambiguity in Žižek’s work is to understand what he means by the terms “economics” and “economy”. While in everyday discourse we often refer to and identify “the economic” as an autonomous field of social reality, for Žižek the economy represents no such thing. In fact, it is precisely the reification of the economy into a positive order of being (“a thing”) that redeems Žižek’s work from the simple charge of economism. How so? How can the economy not have a positive existence in the world, especially when global markets, commodities-exchanges and the industrialized sphere of material production certainly exist in a very materially apparent way?<br />
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To begin with, it is important to recall how the fallacy of economism usually proceeds. As is well known, one of the primary conceptual limits of orthodox Marxist thought (much like liberal thought, surprisingly) was its mistaken belief that the field of economics represented a rational, self-sufficient field of social existence, whose objective laws would inevitably lead to capitalism’s eventual demise. For orthodox Marxism, the economy (“the base”) acts as the determining force upon which all other social facts are founded, reducing the “merely cultural” realm (the superstructure) to an epiphenomenal, even illusory, existence. As [[Karl Marx|Marx]] puts it in his ''[[Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy]]'': “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, ''the real foundation'' [italics mine], on which arises a legal and political superstructure” (Marx 1977: 7). In Marx’s description, only the economy is “real” and historically decisive, a positive force of social existence whose “real foundation” upholds the illusory realm of culture ([[ideology]]).<br />
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Employing the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, Žižek follows the reverse strategy by de-substantializing the economy of its ontological integrity and by materializing ideology, turning economy into a contingent type of social relation and the realm of ideology into a material site of real abstraction. So while the economy might not be real as in an object one can touch, taste or feel, it is very much Real in Lacanian terms. This is because the Real is not a positive existent for Lacan, but the very gap – lack or absence – that separates the symbolic order from itself (“not all”). Hence, “the economic”, Žižek claims, “is thus doubly inscribed in the precise sense which defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core ‘expressed’ in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very struggling principle of these distortions” (''LC'': 291). Against liberal and vulgar Marxist theories of economics, then, there is no “economy” in itself, according to Žižek. The economic is “always already” distributed in culturally symbolic terms, making the political reality of culture a mediated form of class struggle “in a displaced mode” (''PV'': 359–65). Hence, the economic sphere is defined by its “[[Extimacy|ex-timate]]” relationship to the multiplicity of social relationships that articulate the economic relation itself. The modern subject encounters its economic position in a distorted, “parallax” fashion: that is, in terms of sexuality, race, religion, nationality, and so on. Indeed, as Žižek describes it in ''[[The Parallax View]]'': “the relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known paradox of ‘two faces or a vase’: you see either two faces or a vase, never both – you have to make a choice” (''PV'': 271). The subject, for Žižek, is never ''[[homo economicus]]''.<br />
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It is precisely this specific understanding of the political, as marking the distance of the economy from itself, that keeps Žižek’s understanding of capitalism from repeating the “myth of a self-enclosed economic space”, which [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]] claims is the case. ''Pace'' Žižek:<blockquote>What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian “il n’y a pas de rapport …”: there is ''no relationship between economy and politics'', no “metalanguage” that enables us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although – or, rather, because – these two levels are inextricably intertwined. (''Ibid''.)</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>This problem of choice apropos the subject of the economic is why, since ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek has staunchly advocated the “repoliticisation of the economy”: namely, “to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions [with regard to the economy] would ensue from public debate” (''TS'': 353). Thus, as opposed to the orthodox Marxist view, in which “the economy” and “the working-class” represent two positively defined terms in an enclosed space, Žižek’s work shows how the antagonistic site of economy likewise de-ontologizes the very nature of the social itself.<br />
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This is also why it is crucial to insist on the central role of the critique of ''political'' economy: the “economy” cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive order of being precisely in so far as it is always already political, in so far as political (“class”) struggle is at its very heart. In other words, one should always bear in mind that, for a true Marxist, “classes” are not categories of social existence, parts of the social body, but categories of the real of a political struggle that cuts across the entire social body, preventing its “totalization”.<br />
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Hence, unlike those leftist thinkers of “pure politics” such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Alain Badiou]], “the true task [today]”, according to Žižek, is “to think the two dimensions together: the transcendental logic of the commodity form as a mode of functioning of the social totality, and class struggle as the antagonism that cuts across social reality, as its point of subjectivization” (''ET'': 201). Or as Žižek would say, “It’s the ''Political'' Economy, Stupid!”<br />
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[[Category:Zizek_Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Economics&diff=43759Economics2019-04-15T01:57:11Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
The subject of economics enjoys a crucial, if seemingly ambiguous, place in Žižek’s oeuvre. On the one hand, Žižek has repeatedly insisted on the contemporary relevance of [[Karl Marx|Marx]]’s “critique of political economy”, positing the capitalist mode of production as the transcendental determining force of any social totality. Yet, on the other hand, Žižek’s focus on economics has been singularly defined by its thorough engagement with, and critical revision of, the theoretical problems endemic to essentialist models of economic determinism that problematically characterized a large strand of Marxist philosophy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this end, Žižek’s synthesis of Marx’s “critique of political economy” with [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]]’s psychoanalytic account of the psyche’s libidinal economy can be read as an attempt systemically to revise, and newly account for, the place the desiring subject and unconscious forms of social fantasy occupy in the social construction of capitalism’s “objective laws” of economics.<br />
<br />
Yet despite his works’ nuanced critique of economism, this has not kept his many critics – such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Judith Butler]] – from charging Žižek with the endorsement of an implicit, albeit updated version of the same tendency. In their co-written work, ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', Laclau criticizes Žižek’s Marxist theory of capitalism for operating within “a new version of the base/superstructure model” (''CHU'': 293). According to Laclau, Žižek’s economism results from his positing “a fundamental level on which capitalism proceeds according to its own logic, undisturbed by external influences” (''ibid''.). Because he understands Žižek’s model of capitalism as a self-generated economic process that simply unfolds the logical consequences deriving from an “elementary conceptual matrix”, Laclau argues that the Žižekian theory of economics ineluctably “returns to the nineteenth-century myth of an enclosed economic space” (''CHU'': 291).<br />
<br />
While ultimately incorrect, Laclau’s critique is not completely misplaced. Indeed, for Žižek, the capitalist economy – that is, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital” – represents far more than simply one dimension of modern life among others. As Žižek states in his essay “[[Lenin’s Choice]]”, the sphere of the economy should be grasped as “not just that of a limited empirical sphere, but [as] a kind of socio-transcendental ''[[a priori]]'', the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (''RG'': 271). Such a radically determinate viewpoint of the economy’s politically transcendent force ''vis-à-vis'' the social totality is consistent with the entirety of Žižek’s intellectual career. Indeed, in Žižek’s ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', he promotes the rather essentialist-sounding claim that “in the structure of the commodity-form, it is possible to find the transcendental subject” of society (''SO'': 16). By this, Žižek means that the abstract structure of the commodity-form (i.e. its determinate role in mediating social acts of production, exchange and consumption) should be understood not as a rationally neutral economic tool, but as a “real abstraction” – a social form of economic abstraction (i.e. exchange value embodied in money) that temporally precedes and thus objectively determines forms of modern subjectivity (''SO'': 16–30). In making such claims, Žižek follows in the theoretical footsteps of the Western Marxist tradition began by [[Georg Lukács]], who departed from the vulgar economism of the Second International during the 1920s, and for whom “the class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just [thought of as] a phenomenon limited to the particular ‘domain’ of the economy, but the [very] structuring principle that [[Overdetermination|overdetermines]] the social totality” (''CHU'': 96). Hence, Žižek claims that the “social organization of production (‘the mode of production’) is not just one among many levels of social organization, it is the site of ‘contradiction’ … which, as such, spills over into all other levels” of social reality (''LC'': 295).<br />
<br />
As “essentialist” as these aforementioned claims appear at first glance, there exists a whole “other scene” in Žižek’s work, one that insists on precisely the opposite fact: namely, that the determinate figure of the economy is precisely “not-all”(in the Lacanian sense), not a coherent whole or totality of social existence. In this conception, the economic horizon represents not a transcendental cause, but rather a sort of social limit or “traumatic kernel”, which is expressed by the political existence of the [[class struggle]]. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek argues in this vein, stating that the “the ‘economy’ cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive ‘order of being’, precisely insofar as it is always political, insofar as political (‘class’) struggle is at its very heart” (''ET'': 198). In ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', Žižek refers to the “determining role of the economy” both as an “absent cause” and as “an ‘impotent’ pseudo-cause” of the social (''LC'': 291). According to this line of thought, “the determining role of the economy” should not, pace Žižek, be imagined as a “hidden meta-essence which then expresses itself within a two-level-distance in a cultural struggle” (''LC'': 290). Rather, as he describes it in [[Less Than Nothing|''Less Than Nothing'']]: “it [the economy] is the absent X which circulates between the multiple levels of the social field (economic, political, ideological, legal …), distributing them in their specific articulation” (''LN'': 361).<br />
<br />
These two seemingly contradictory motifs in Žižek’s work apropos the problem of economics (i.e. “the sphere of the economy”) beg the following question: is the sphere of the economy a “transcendental logic” – that is, the fundamental basis of which other cultural phenomena of struggle (such as those of religion, race, gender and sexuality) represent a mere epiphenomenal expression? The first way to resolve this apparent ambiguity in Žižek’s work is to understand what he means by the terms “economics” and “economy”. While in everyday discourse we often refer to and identify “the economic” as an autonomous field of social reality, for Žižek the economy represents no such thing. In fact, it is precisely the reification of the economy into a positive order of being (“a thing”) that redeems Žižek’s work from the simple charge of economism. How so? How can the economy not have a positive existence in the world, especially when global markets, commodities-exchanges and the industrialized sphere of material production certainly exist in a very materially apparent way?<br />
<br />
To begin with, it is important to recall how the fallacy of economism usually proceeds. As is well known, one of the primary conceptual limits of orthodox Marxist thought (much like liberal thought, surprisingly) was its mistaken belief that the field of economics represented a rational, self-sufficient field of social existence, whose objective laws would inevitably lead to capitalism’s eventual demise. For orthodox Marxism, the economy (“the base”) acts as the determining force upon which all other social facts are founded, reducing the “merely cultural” realm (the superstructure) to an epiphenomenal, even illusory, existence. As [[Karl Marx|Marx]] puts it in his ''[[Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy]]'': “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, ''the real foundation'' [italics mine], on which arises a legal and political superstructure” (Marx 1977: 7). In Marx’s description, only the economy is “real” and historically decisive, a positive force of social existence whose “real foundation” upholds the illusory realm of culture ([[ideology]]).<br />
<br />
Employing the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, Žižek follows the reverse strategy by de-substantializing the economy of its ontological integrity and by materializing ideology, turning economy into a contingent type of social relation and the realm of ideology into a material site of real abstraction. So while the economy might not be real as in an object one can touch, taste or feel, it is very much Real in Lacanian terms. This is because the Real is not a positive existent for Lacan, but the very gap – lack or absence – that separates the symbolic order from itself (“not all”). Hence, “the economic”, Žižek claims, “is thus doubly inscribed in the precise sense which defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core ‘expressed’ in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very struggling principle of these distortions” (''LC'': 291). Against liberal and vulgar Marxist theories of economics, then, there is no “economy” in itself, according to Žižek. The economic is “always already” distributed in culturally symbolic terms, making the political reality of culture a mediated form of class struggle “in a displaced mode” (''PV'': 359–65). Hence, the economic sphere is defined by its “[[Extimacy|ex-timate]]” relationship to the multiplicity of social relationships that articulate the economic relation itself. The modern subject encounters its economic position in a distorted, “parallax” fashion: that is, in terms of sexuality, race, religion, nationality, and so on. Indeed, as Žižek describes it in ''[[The Parallax View]]'': “the relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known paradox of ‘two faces or a vase’: you see either two faces or a vase, never both – you have to make a choice” (''PV'': 271). The subject, for Žižek, is never ''[[homo economicus]]''.<br />
<br />
It is precisely this specific understanding of the political, as marking the distance of the economy from itself, that keeps Žižek’s understanding of capitalism from repeating the “myth of a self-enclosed economic space”, which [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]] claims is the case. ''Pace'' Žižek:<blockquote>What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian “il n’y a pas de rapport …”: there is ''no relationship between economy and politics'', no “metalanguage” that enables us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although – or, rather, because – these two levels are inextricably intertwined. (''Ibid''.)</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>This problem of choice apropos the subject of the economic is why, since ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek has staunchly advocated the “repoliticisation of the economy”: namely, “to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions [with regard to the economy] would ensue from public debate” (''TS'': 353). Thus, as opposed to the orthodox Marxist view, in which “the economy” and “the working-class” represent two positively defined terms in an enclosed space, Žižek’s work shows how the antagonistic site of economy likewise de-ontologizes the very nature of the social itself.<br />
<br />
This is also why it is crucial to insist on the central role of the critique of ''political'' economy: the “economy” cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive order of being precisely in so far as it is always already political, in so far as political (“class”) struggle is at its very heart. In other words, one should always bear in mind that, for a true Marxist, “classes” are not categories of social existence, parts of the social body, but categories of the real of a political struggle that cuts across the entire social body, preventing its “totalization”.<br />
<br />
Hence, unlike those leftist thinkers of “pure politics” such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Alain Badiou]], “the true task [today]”, according to Žižek, is “to think the two dimensions together: the transcendental logic of the commodity form as a mode of functioning of the social totality, and class struggle as the antagonism that cuts across social reality, as its point of subjectivization” (''ET'': 201). Or as Žižek would say, “It’s the ''Political'' Economy, Stupid!”<br />
<br />
[[Category:Zizek_Dictonary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Economics&diff=43758Economics2019-04-15T01:56:41Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
The subject of economics enjoys a crucial, if seemingly ambiguous, place in Žižek’s oeuvre. On the one hand, Žižek has repeatedly insisted on the contemporary relevance of [[Karl Marx|Marx]]’s “critique of political economy”, positing the capitalist mode of production as the transcendental determining force of any social totality. Yet, on the other hand, Žižek’s focus on economics has been singularly defined by its thorough engagement with, and critical revision of, the theoretical problems endemic to essentialist models of economic determinism that problematically characterized a large strand of Marxist philosophy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this end, Žižek’s synthesis of Marx’s “critique of political economy” with [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]]’s psychoanalytic account of the psyche’s libidinal economy can be read as an attempt systemically to revise, and newly account for, the place the desiring subject and unconscious forms of social fantasy occupy in the social construction of capitalism’s “objective laws” of economics.<br />
<br />
Yet despite his works’ nuanced critique of economism, this has not kept his many critics – such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Judith Butler]] – from charging Žižek with the endorsement of an implicit, albeit updated version of the same tendency. In their co-written work, ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', Laclau criticizes Žižek’s Marxist theory of capitalism for operating within “a new version of the base/superstructure model” (''CHU'': 293). According to Laclau, Žižek’s economism results from his positing “a fundamental level on which capitalism proceeds according to its own logic, undisturbed by external influences” (''ibid''.). Because he understands Žižek’s model of capitalism as a self-generated economic process that simply unfolds the logical consequences deriving from an “elementary conceptual matrix”, Laclau argues that the Žižekian theory of economics ineluctably “returns to the nineteenth-century myth of an enclosed economic space” (''CHU'': 291).<br />
<br />
While ultimately incorrect, Laclau’s critique is not completely misplaced. Indeed, for Žižek, the capitalist economy – that is, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital” – represents far more than simply one dimension of modern life among others. As Žižek states in his essay “[[Lenin’s Choice]]”, the sphere of the economy should be grasped as “not just that of a limited empirical sphere, but [as] a kind of socio-transcendental ''[[a priori]]'', the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (''RG'': 271). Such a radically determinate viewpoint of the economy’s politically transcendent force ''vis-à-vis'' the social totality is consistent with the entirety of Žižek’s intellectual career. Indeed, in Žižek’s ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', he promotes the rather essentialist-sounding claim that “in the structure of the commodity-form, it is possible to find the transcendental subject” of society (''SO'': 16). By this, Žižek means that the abstract structure of the commodity-form (i.e. its determinate role in mediating social acts of production, exchange and consumption) should be understood not as a rationally neutral economic tool, but as a “real abstraction” – a social form of economic abstraction (i.e. exchange value embodied in money) that temporally precedes and thus objectively determines forms of modern subjectivity (''SO'': 16–30). In making such claims, Žižek follows in the theoretical footsteps of the Western Marxist tradition began by [[Georg Lukács]], who departed from the vulgar economism of the Second International during the 1920s, and for whom “the class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just [thought of as] a phenomenon limited to the particular ‘domain’ of the economy, but the [very] structuring principle that [[Overdetermination|overdetermines]] the social totality” (''CHU'': 96). Hence, Žižek claims that the “social organization of production (‘the mode of production’) is not just one among many levels of social organization, it is the site of ‘contradiction’ … which, as such, spills over into all other levels” of social reality (''LC'': 295).<br />
<br />
As “essentialist” as these aforementioned claims appear at first glance, there exists a whole “other scene” in Žižek’s work, one that insists on precisely the opposite fact: namely, that the determinate figure of the economy is precisely “not-all”(in the Lacanian sense), not a coherent whole or totality of social existence. In this conception, the economic horizon represents not a transcendental cause, but rather a sort of social limit or “traumatic kernel”, which is expressed by the political existence of the [[class struggle]]. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek argues in this vein, stating that the “the ‘economy’ cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive ‘order of being’, precisely insofar as it is always political, insofar as political (‘class’) struggle is at its very heart” (''ET'': 198). In ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', Žižek refers to the “determining role of the economy” both as an “absent cause” and as “an ‘impotent’ pseudo-cause” of the social (''LC'': 291). According to this line of thought, “the determining role of the economy” should not, pace Žižek, be imagined as a “hidden meta-essence which then expresses itself within a two-level-distance in a cultural struggle” (''LC'': 290). Rather, as he describes it in [[Less Than Nothing|''Less Than Nothing'']]: “it [the economy] is the absent X which circulates between the multiple levels of the social field (economic, political, ideological, legal …), distributing them in their specific articulation” (''LN'': 361).<br />
<br />
These two seemingly contradictory motifs in Žižek’s work apropos the problem of economics (i.e. “the sphere of the economy”) beg the following question: is the sphere of the economy a “transcendental logic” – that is, the fundamental basis of which other cultural phenomena of struggle (such as those of religion, race, gender and sexuality) represent a mere epiphenomenal expression? The first way to resolve this apparent ambiguity in Žižek’s work is to understand what he means by the terms “economics” and “economy”. While in everyday discourse we often refer to and identify “the economic” as an autonomous field of social reality, for Žižek the economy represents no such thing. In fact, it is precisely the reification of the economy into a positive order of being (“a thing”) that redeems Žižek’s work from the simple charge of economism. How so? How can the economy not have a positive existence in the world, especially when global markets, commodities-exchanges and the industrialized sphere of material production certainly exist in a very materially apparent way?<br />
<br />
To begin with, it is important to recall how the fallacy of economism usually proceeds. As is well known, one of the primary conceptual limits of orthodox Marxist thought (much like liberal thought, surprisingly) was its mistaken belief that the field of economics represented a rational, self-sufficient field of social existence, whose objective laws would inevitably lead to capitalism’s eventual demise. For orthodox Marxism, the economy (“the base”) acts as the determining force upon which all other social facts are founded, reducing the “merely cultural” realm (the superstructure) to an epiphenomenal, even illusory, existence. As [[Karl Marx|Marx]] puts it in his ''[[Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy]]'': “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, ''the real foundation'' [italics mine], on which arises a legal and political superstructure” (Marx 1977: 7). In Marx’s description, only the economy is “real” and historically decisive, a positive force of social existence whose “real foundation” upholds the illusory realm of culture ([[ideology]]).<br />
<br />
Employing the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, Žižek follows the reverse strategy by de-substantializing the economy of its ontological integrity and by materializing ideology, turning economy into a contingent type of social relation and the realm of ideology into a material site of real abstraction. So while the economy might not be real as in an object one can touch, taste or feel, it is very much Real in Lacanian terms. This is because the Real is not a positive existent for Lacan, but the very gap – lack or absence – that separates the symbolic order from itself (“not all”). Hence, “the economic”, Žižek claims, “is thus doubly inscribed in the precise sense which defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core ‘expressed’ in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very struggling principle of these distortions” (''LC'': 291). Against liberal and vulgar Marxist theories of economics, then, there is no “economy” in itself, according to Žižek. The economic is “always already” distributed in culturally symbolic terms, making the political reality of culture a mediated form of class struggle “in a displaced mode” (''PV'': 359–65). Hence, the economic sphere is defined by its “[[Extimacy|ex-timate]]” relationship to the multiplicity of social relationships that articulate the economic relation itself. The modern subject encounters its economic position in a distorted, “parallax” fashion: that is, in terms of sexuality, race, religion, nationality, and so on. Indeed, as Žižek describes it in ''[[The Parallax View]]'': “the relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known paradox of ‘two faces or a vase’: you see either two faces or a vase, never both – you have to make a choice” (''PV'': 271). The subject, for Žižek, is never ''[[homo economicus]]''.<br />
<br />
It is precisely this specific understanding of the political, as marking the distance of the economy from itself, that keeps Žižek’s understanding of capitalism from repeating the “myth of a self-enclosed economic space”, which [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]] claims is the case. ''Pace'' Žižek:<blockquote>What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian “il n’y a pas de rapport …”: there is ''no relationship between economy and politics'', no “metalanguage” that enables us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although – or, rather, because – these two levels are inextricably intertwined. (''Ibid''.)</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>This problem of choice apropos the subject of the economic is why, since ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek has staunchly advocated the “repoliticisation of the economy”: namely, “to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions [with regard to the economy] would ensue from public debate” (''TS'': 353). Thus, as opposed to the orthodox Marxist view, in which “the economy” and “the working-class” represent two positively defined terms in an enclosed space, Žižek’s work shows how the antagonistic site of economy likewise de-ontologizes the very nature of the social itself.<br />
<br />
This is also why it is crucial to insist on the central role of the critique of ''political'' economy: the “economy” cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive order of being precisely in so far as it is always already political, in so far as political (“class”) struggle is at its very heart. In other words, one should always bear in mind that, for a true Marxist, “classes” are not categories of social existence, parts of the social body, but categories of the real of a political struggle that cuts across the entire social body, preventing its “totalization”.<br />
<br />
Hence, unlike those leftist thinkers of “pure politics” such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Alain Badiou]], “the true task [today]”, according to Žižek, is “to think the two dimensions together: the transcendental logic of the commodity form as a mode of functioning of the social totality, and class struggle as the antagonism that cuts across social reality, as its point of subjectivization” (''ET'': 201). Or as Žižek would say, “It’s the ''Political'' Economy, Stupid!”<br />
<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictonary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Economics&diff=43757Economics2019-04-15T01:56:26Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
The subject of economics enjoys a crucial, if seemingly ambiguous, place in Žižek’s oeuvre. On the one hand, Žižek has repeatedly insisted on the contemporary relevance of [[Karl Marx|Marx]]’s “critique of political economy”, positing the capitalist mode of production as the transcendental determining force of any social totality. Yet, on the other hand, Žižek’s focus on economics has been singularly defined by its thorough engagement with, and critical revision of, the theoretical problems endemic to essentialist models of economic determinism that problematically characterized a large strand of Marxist philosophy throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To this end, Žižek’s synthesis of Marx’s “critique of political economy” with [[Sigmund Freud|Freud]]’s psychoanalytic account of the psyche’s libidinal economy can be read as an attempt systemically to revise, and newly account for, the place the desiring subject and unconscious forms of social fantasy occupy in the social construction of capitalism’s “objective laws” of economics.<br />
<br />
Yet despite his works’ nuanced critique of economism, this has not kept his many critics – such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Judith Butler]] – from charging Žižek with the endorsement of an implicit, albeit updated version of the same tendency. In their co-written work, ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', Laclau criticizes Žižek’s Marxist theory of capitalism for operating within “a new version of the base/superstructure model” (''CHU'': 293). According to Laclau, Žižek’s economism results from his positing “a fundamental level on which capitalism proceeds according to its own logic, undisturbed by external influences” (''ibid''.). Because he understands Žižek’s model of capitalism as a self-generated economic process that simply unfolds the logical consequences deriving from an “elementary conceptual matrix”, Laclau argues that the Žižekian theory of economics ineluctably “returns to the nineteenth-century myth of an enclosed economic space” (''CHU'': 291).<br />
<br />
While ultimately incorrect, Laclau’s critique is not completely misplaced. Indeed, for Žižek, the capitalist economy – that is, “the structure of the universe of commodities and capital” – represents far more than simply one dimension of modern life among others. As Žižek states in his essay “[[Lenin’s Choice]]”, the sphere of the economy should be grasped as “not just that of a limited empirical sphere, but [as] a kind of socio-transcendental ''[[a priori]]'', the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations” (''RG'': 271). Such a radically determinate viewpoint of the economy’s politically transcendent force ''vis-à-vis'' the social totality is consistent with the entirety of Žižek’s intellectual career. Indeed, in Žižek’s ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', he promotes the rather essentialist-sounding claim that “in the structure of the commodity-form, it is possible to find the transcendental subject” of society (''SO'': 16). By this, Žižek means that the abstract structure of the commodity-form (i.e. its determinate role in mediating social acts of production, exchange and consumption) should be understood not as a rationally neutral economic tool, but as a “real abstraction” – a social form of economic abstraction (i.e. exchange value embodied in money) that temporally precedes and thus objectively determines forms of modern subjectivity (''SO'': 16–30). In making such claims, Žižek follows in the theoretical footsteps of the Western Marxist tradition began by [[Georg Lukács]], who departed from the vulgar economism of the Second International during the 1920s, and for whom “the class-and-commodity structure of capitalism is not just [thought of as] a phenomenon limited to the particular ‘domain’ of the economy, but the [very] structuring principle that [[Overdetermination|overdetermines]] the social totality” (''CHU'': 96). Hence, Žižek claims that the “social organization of production (‘the mode of production’) is not just one among many levels of social organization, it is the site of ‘contradiction’ … which, as such, spills over into all other levels” of social reality (''LC'': 295).<br />
<br />
As “essentialist” as these aforementioned claims appear at first glance, there exists a whole “other scene” in Žižek’s work, one that insists on precisely the opposite fact: namely, that the determinate figure of the economy is precisely “not-all”(in the Lacanian sense), not a coherent whole or totality of social existence. In this conception, the economic horizon represents not a transcendental cause, but rather a sort of social limit or “traumatic kernel”, which is expressed by the political existence of the [[class struggle]]. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek argues in this vein, stating that the “the ‘economy’ cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive ‘order of being’, precisely insofar as it is always political, insofar as political (‘class’) struggle is at its very heart” (''ET'': 198). In ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', Žižek refers to the “determining role of the economy” both as an “absent cause” and as “an ‘impotent’ pseudo-cause” of the social (''LC'': 291). According to this line of thought, “the determining role of the economy” should not, pace Žižek, be imagined as a “hidden meta-essence which then expresses itself within a two-level-distance in a cultural struggle” (''LC'': 290). Rather, as he describes it in [[Less Than Nothing|''Less Than Nothing'']]: “it [the economy] is the absent X which circulates between the multiple levels of the social field (economic, political, ideological, legal …), distributing them in their specific articulation” (''LN'': 361).<br />
<br />
These two seemingly contradictory motifs in Žižek’s work apropos the problem of economics (i.e. “the sphere of the economy”) beg the following question: is the sphere of the economy a “transcendental logic” – that is, the fundamental basis of which other cultural phenomena of struggle (such as those of religion, race, gender and sexuality) represent a mere epiphenomenal expression? The first way to resolve this apparent ambiguity in Žižek’s work is to understand what he means by the terms “economics” and “economy”. While in everyday discourse we often refer to and identify “the economic” as an autonomous field of social reality, for Žižek the economy represents no such thing. In fact, it is precisely the reification of the economy into a positive order of being (“a thing”) that redeems Žižek’s work from the simple charge of economism. How so? How can the economy not have a positive existence in the world, especially when global markets, commodities-exchanges and the industrialized sphere of material production certainly exist in a very materially apparent way?<br />
<br />
To begin with, it is important to recall how the fallacy of economism usually proceeds. As is well known, one of the primary conceptual limits of orthodox Marxist thought (much like liberal thought, surprisingly) was its mistaken belief that the field of economics represented a rational, self-sufficient field of social existence, whose objective laws would inevitably lead to capitalism’s eventual demise. For orthodox Marxism, the economy (“the base”) acts as the determining force upon which all other social facts are founded, reducing the “merely cultural” realm (the superstructure) to an epiphenomenal, even illusory, existence. As [[Karl Marx|Marx]] puts it in his ''[[Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy]]'': “The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, ''the real foundation'' [italics mine], on which arises a legal and political superstructure” (Marx 1977: 7). In Marx’s description, only the economy is “real” and historically decisive, a positive force of social existence whose “real foundation” upholds the illusory realm of culture ([[ideology]]).<br />
<br />
Employing the insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, Žižek follows the reverse strategy by de-substantializing the economy of its ontological integrity and by materializing ideology, turning economy into a contingent type of social relation and the realm of ideology into a material site of real abstraction. So while the economy might not be real as in an object one can touch, taste or feel, it is very much Real in Lacanian terms. This is because the Real is not a positive existent for Lacan, but the very gap – lack or absence – that separates the symbolic order from itself (“not all”). Hence, “the economic”, Žižek claims, “is thus doubly inscribed in the precise sense which defines the Lacanian Real: it is simultaneously the hard core ‘expressed’ in other struggles through displacements and other forms of distortion, and the very struggling principle of these distortions” (''LC'': 291). Against liberal and vulgar Marxist theories of economics, then, there is no “economy” in itself, according to Žižek. The economic is “always already” distributed in culturally symbolic terms, making the political reality of culture a mediated form of class struggle “in a displaced mode” (''PV'': 359–65). Hence, the economic sphere is defined by its “[[Extimacy|ex-timate]]” relationship to the multiplicity of social relationships that articulate the economic relation itself. The modern subject encounters its economic position in a distorted, “parallax” fashion: that is, in terms of sexuality, race, religion, nationality, and so on. Indeed, as Žižek describes it in ''[[The Parallax View]]'': “the relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known paradox of ‘two faces or a vase’: you see either two faces or a vase, never both – you have to make a choice” (''PV'': 271). The subject, for Žižek, is never ''[[homo economicus]]''.<br />
<br />
It is precisely this specific understanding of the political, as marking the distance of the economy from itself, that keeps Žižek’s understanding of capitalism from repeating the “myth of a self-enclosed economic space”, which [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]] claims is the case. ''Pace'' Žižek:<blockquote>What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian “il n’y a pas de rapport …”: there is ''no relationship between economy and politics'', no “metalanguage” that enables us to grasp the two levels from the same neutral standpoint, although – or, rather, because – these two levels are inextricably intertwined. (''Ibid''.)</blockquote><blockquote></blockquote>This problem of choice apropos the subject of the economic is why, since ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek has staunchly advocated the “repoliticisation of the economy”: namely, “to bring about a society in which risky long-term decisions [with regard to the economy] would ensue from public debate” (''TS'': 353). Thus, as opposed to the orthodox Marxist view, in which “the economy” and “the working-class” represent two positively defined terms in an enclosed space, Žižek’s work shows how the antagonistic site of economy likewise de-ontologizes the very nature of the social itself.<br />
<br />
This is also why it is crucial to insist on the central role of the critique of ''political'' economy: the “economy” cannot be reduced to a sphere of the positive order of being precisely in so far as it is always already political, in so far as political (“class”) struggle is at its very heart. In other words, one should always bear in mind that, for a true Marxist, “classes” are not categories of social existence, parts of the social body, but categories of the real of a political struggle that cuts across the entire social body, preventing its “totalization”.<br />
<br />
Hence, unlike those leftist thinkers of “pure politics” such as [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Alain Badiou]], “the true task [today]”, according to Žižek, is “to think the two dimensions together: the transcendental logic of the commodity form as a mode of functioning of the social totality, and class struggle as the antagonism that cuts across social reality, as its point of subjectivization” (''ET'': 201). Or as Žižek would say, “It’s the ''Political'' Economy, Stupid!”</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Ecology&diff=43756Ecology2019-04-15T01:44:12Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Žižek offers a reading of ecology across many aspects of the notion. Ecology features primarily as an example in the service of Žižek’s other concepts such as in a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw8LPn4irao video interview conducted by the Dutch Left theory group VPRO International] celebrating the launch of his 2010 opus ''[[Living in the End Times]]'' and, coincidentally, the site of his most consistent and discursive elaboration of the ecological crisis to date. Given the effervescent style of his prose, this is hardly Žižek’s only or most important contribution to ecological debates. Instead, it is recommended that interested readers consider the notion of ecology-in-itself as it directly and obliquely manifests in Žižek’s work through the philosophical, political and psychoanalytic lens common to this maestro of critique. In this way, we may account for not only ecology but also its diverse species of concepts, including nature, structure, divinity, life, death, purpose, evolution and catastrophe. As a result, we may see ecology awry as Žižek does, observe its catastrophic strokes giving rise to modern ecological organization and processes such as oil or land formation or its fragmentation into a world of immanent new age wisdom supposedly transcending private or publicly funded scientific investigations. The starting point for a reading of ecology in Žižek is, rightly or wrongly, nature – although we should resist immediately rendering this passim as some orderly naturalism.<br />
<br />
Žižek’s discussion of ecology, such as in ''[[Living in the End Times]]'' or ''[[Violence: Big Ideas / Small Books|Violence]]'', proposes that there is no order to nature or indeed no nature at all. Instead, he invites us to confront a dark chaos that is necessarily contingent – nature “off the rails” so to speak. At issue for contemporary ecologies, according to the Žižekian arguments, is the order that gives structure to and is structured by environments. These environments need not be anthropocentric, terrestrial or cosmic. Ecologies today appear in a wide array of fields from biological sciences to media studies, and Žižek is all too aware that it is the fundamental principle of the ecological approach that is at issue in this multiplicity. In the history of philosophy, the object of ecological fascination is nature or “the house of life”, yet the essence of nature’s meaning is divergent. Th is divergence is explored by Žižek in his approach to ecology across a variety of texts, and they are outlined below for consideration.<br />
<br />
First, nature or Nature is rejected by Žižek for its ideological emphasis on a world inhabited by gods. In Nature divinity is not impersonal and distant but a meddling and cosmic power that can be both jealous and unforgiving. Ecology for Nature means the divine cosmic order disclosed by myths and poetry, not interpretation or modern scientific method. Ecology is here what is given by the gods. Aligning precritical ecology in accordance with the gods, Nature allows an immanent and present connection to the cosmic and divine, the Sun as much as the Olympic Pantheon. This Nature is oracular and breeds generations of prophets. It is also associated with precritical philosophies and sophistries that essentialize and totemize the world. Th is fundamentally ideological and spiritual connection runs afoul on critical grounds for Žižek as it lacks a sensitivity to the Lacano-Hegelian turn to the radical freedom of the (mostly) human subject. Freedom is here posited by ecological order; it is a forced choice, a simple negativity that cannot differentiate between actions (going through the motions as in Pascalian belief) and acts (interruptions and ruptures in the ordinary historical order such as Leninist revolution) – all is fated through the prophetic vision. Ecology based on Nature is thus an intellectual cul-de-sac that annuls free acts with the illusion of a forced choice, an immutable destiny.<br />
<br />
The next form of ecology that appears in Žižek’s work rests on a concept of second nature. Second nature devolves the direct line to divinity presented by Nature into an objective, shared and plural universe of signs and discourses that seek the truth of some “real” ecological order. Here God is unconscious, unable to heed the symbolic demarcation of scientific truth. The divine base of nature here requires a theological apparatus of rituals, texts, festivals and icons operated and overseen by priests and clergy rather than prophets. Ultimately with a basis in second nature, ecology remains open and contingent rather than [[Overdetermination|overdetermined]] by a forced choice. Ecological catastrophes are thus the product of endeavours from within ecology itself that are catastrophic for the “ordained” order of things that people may choose to believe or not. With no fate to guide ecology’s process and outcomes, a theology takes over the burden of direction. But, as history has shown on ample occasions, this theological circumscription of Nature remains incomplete, that is, God is not the same as our theological depiction of God because He is unknowable.<br />
<br />
Another form of ecology in Žižek’s work features nature as a discourse. Whereas the previous second nature forever approximates the essence of ecology, this third type of discursive approach to nature treats all ecological approaches as relative to one another. The infamous Sokal affair typifies this frivolous postmodern loop of representation, that is, a fake social sciences paper is misconstrued as a valid contribution to knowledge. Here every interpretation is circumspect; the universalism of the clergy of second nature is revealed as yet another “provincial” fantasy. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek describes this discursivity as the contextualization of predictions about ecological catastrophe:<blockquote>While it is difficult to estimate the soundness of these predictions, one thing is sure: an extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place right in front of our eyes – the impossible is becoming possible. An event first experienced as real but impossible becomes real and no longer impossible. (''ET'': 328)</blockquote>What the discourse of ecology relies upon is thus a division between knowledge and belief: the scientific knowledge that predicts ecological disaster shifts from being real but impossible to a real possibility, not because the knowledge changes but instead because the discursive context in which such knowledge is articulated shifts, making the knowledge about such disasters believable.<br />
<br />
The fourth form of ecology in Žižek’s work suggests that nature is not our or anyone’s home. Instead, nature is a crazy off -the-rails chaos ridden with catastrophic events. This is perhaps the most central form of ecology for Žižek’s oeuvre, and is indebted both to his interest in the radical negativity of [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]] and the primordial abgrund of [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling|Schelling]]. Th is particular position requires a parallax view of nature compared to the other three formalizations offered above. Meteorite impacts, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, cyclones, tornadoes: this planetary hurly-burly is the ground of nature’s existence and, as Žižek asserts in his interview with VPRO International, our modern world also. The exemplary object for this purview is oil. Unlike some other raw materials, oil reserves are the product of massive ecological disasters where the extinguishment of living matter has been so great that it forms a gradually decaying layer that is covered by aeons of sedimentary deposits. The massive scale of the type of catastrophe required for oil reserves to occur in such vast quantities worldwide is unthinkable or purely abstract knowledge at best. Rather than treating these events as natural disasters, Žižek’s conceptual point is that they come from an original space that troubles the signs, meanings and temporalities of the institutions and everyday life erected upon it. This space is an iteration of what Žižek terms the Real, although here it is a blend of both its Lacanian formulation and the Schellingian abgrund of the drafts of ''[[Ages of the World]]''. Nature in this frame is not about a balanced ecology; ecology is dark and chaotic, exposing us to contingencies up to and including its physical laws.<br />
<br />
In sum, across his many writings and seminars Žižek offers his readers an array of ways to conceive of ecology. The selection above is not exhaustive of the ways we may think ecology through Žižek’s work. However, the selection is indicative of the polymorphous avenues that Žižek’s thought is famous for pursuing. For Žižek’s thought, therefore, ecology may be immanent and totemic, institutional and symbolic, discursive and fantasmatic, or dark and contingent.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Ecology&diff=43755Ecology2019-04-15T01:43:57Z<p>TheoryLeaks: Created page with "== In the work of Slavoj Žižek == Žižek offers a reading of ecology across many aspects of the notion. Ecology features primarily as an example in the service of Žižek..."</p>
<hr />
<div>== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Žižek offers a reading of ecology across many aspects of the notion. Ecology features primarily as an example in the service of Žižek’s other concepts such as in a [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw8LPn4irao video interview conducted by the Dutch Left theory group VPRO International] celebrating the launch of his 2010 opus ''[[Living in the End Times]]'' and, coincidentally, the site of his most consistent and discursive elaboration of the ecological crisis to date. Given the effervescent style of his prose, this is hardly Žižek’s only or most important contribution to ecological debates. Instead, it is recommended that interested readers consider the notion of ecology-in-itself as it directly and obliquely manifests in Žižek’s work through the philosophical, political and psychoanalytic lens common to this maestro of critique. In this way, we may account for not only ecology but also its diverse species of concepts, including nature, structure, divinity, life, death, purpose, evolution and catastrophe. As a result, we may see ecology awry as Žižek does, observe its catastrophic strokes giving rise to modern ecological organization and processes such as oil or land formation or its fragmentation into a world of immanent new age wisdom supposedly transcending private or publicly funded scientific investigations. The starting point for a reading of ecology in Žižek is, rightly or wrongly, nature – although we should resist immediately rendering this passim as some orderly naturalism.<br />
<br />
Žižek’s discussion of ecology, such as in ''[[Living in the End Times]]'' or ''[[Violence: Big Ideas / Small Books|Violence]]'', proposes that there is no order to nature or indeed no nature at all. Instead, he invites us to confront a dark chaos that is necessarily contingent – nature “off the rails” so to speak. At issue for contemporary ecologies, according to the Žižekian arguments, is the order that gives structure to and is structured by environments. These environments need not be anthropocentric, terrestrial or cosmic. Ecologies today appear in a wide array of fields from biological sciences to media studies, and Žižek is all too aware that it is the fundamental principle of the ecological approach that is at issue in this multiplicity. In the history of philosophy, the object of ecological fascination is nature or “the house of life”, yet the essence of nature’s meaning is divergent. Th is divergence is explored by Žižek in his approach to ecology across a variety of texts, and they are outlined below for consideration.<br />
<br />
First, nature or Nature is rejected by Žižek for its ideological emphasis on a world inhabited by gods. In Nature divinity is not impersonal and distant but a meddling and cosmic power that can be both jealous and unforgiving. Ecology for Nature means the divine cosmic order disclosed by myths and poetry, not interpretation or modern scientific method. Ecology is here what is given by the gods. Aligning precritical ecology in accordance with the gods, Nature allows an immanent and present connection to the cosmic and divine, the Sun as much as the Olympic Pantheon. This Nature is oracular and breeds generations of prophets. It is also associated with precritical philosophies and sophistries that essentialize and totemize the world. Th is fundamentally ideological and spiritual connection runs afoul on critical grounds for Žižek as it lacks a sensitivity to the Lacano-Hegelian turn to the radical freedom of the (mostly) human subject. Freedom is here posited by ecological order; it is a forced choice, a simple negativity that cannot differentiate between actions (going through the motions as in Pascalian belief) and acts (interruptions and ruptures in the ordinary historical order such as Leninist revolution) – all is fated through the prophetic vision. Ecology based on Nature is thus an intellectual cul-de-sac that annuls free acts with the illusion of a forced choice, an immutable destiny.<br />
<br />
The next form of ecology that appears in Žižek’s work rests on a concept of second nature. Second nature devolves the direct line to divinity presented by Nature into an objective, shared and plural universe of signs and discourses that seek the truth of some “real” ecological order. Here God is unconscious, unable to heed the symbolic demarcation of scientific truth. The divine base of nature here requires a theological apparatus of rituals, texts, festivals and icons operated and overseen by priests and clergy rather than prophets. Ultimately with a basis in second nature, ecology remains open and contingent rather than [[Overdetermination|overdetermined]] by a forced choice. Ecological catastrophes are thus the product of endeavours from within ecology itself that are catastrophic for the “ordained” order of things that people may choose to believe or not. With no fate to guide ecology’s process and outcomes, a theology takes over the burden of direction. But, as history has shown on ample occasions, this theological circumscription of Nature remains incomplete, that is, God is not the same as our theological depiction of God because He is unknowable.<br />
<br />
Another form of ecology in Žižek’s work features nature as a discourse. Whereas the previous second nature forever approximates the essence of ecology, this third type of discursive approach to nature treats all ecological approaches as relative to one another. The infamous Sokal affair typifies this frivolous postmodern loop of representation, that is, a fake social sciences paper is misconstrued as a valid contribution to knowledge. Here every interpretation is circumspect; the universalism of the clergy of second nature is revealed as yet another “provincial” fantasy. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek describes this discursivity as the contextualization of predictions about ecological catastrophe:<blockquote>While it is difficult to estimate the soundness of these predictions, one thing is sure: an extraordinary social and psychological change is taking place right in front of our eyes – the impossible is becoming possible. An event first experienced as real but impossible becomes real and no longer impossible. (''ET'': 328)</blockquote>What the discourse of ecology relies upon is thus a division between knowledge and belief: the scientific knowledge that predicts ecological disaster shifts from being real but impossible to a real possibility, not because the knowledge changes but instead because the discursive context in which such knowledge is articulated shifts, making the knowledge about such disasters believable.<br />
<br />
The fourth form of ecology in Žižek’s work suggests that nature is not our or anyone’s home. Instead, nature is a crazy off -the-rails chaos ridden with catastrophic events. This is perhaps the most central form of ecology for Žižek’s oeuvre, and is indebted both to his interest in the radical negativity of [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]] and the primordial abgrund of [[Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling|Schelling]]. Th is particular position requires a parallax view of nature compared to the other three formalizations offered above. Meteorite impacts, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, cyclones, tornadoes: this planetary hurly-burly is the ground of nature’s existence and, as Žižek asserts in his interview with VPRO International, our modern world also. The exemplary object for this purview is oil. Unlike some other raw materials, oil reserves are the product of massive ecological disasters where the extinguishment of living matter has been so great that it forms a gradually decaying layer that is covered by aeons of sedimentary deposits. The massive scale of the type of catastrophe required for oil reserves to occur in such vast quantities worldwide is unthinkable or purely abstract knowledge at best. Rather than treating these events as natural disasters, Žižek’s conceptual point is that they come from an original space that troubles the signs, meanings and temporalities of the institutions and everyday life erected upon it. This space is an iteration of what Žižek terms the Real, although here it is a blend of both its Lacanian formulation and the Schellingian abgrund of the drafts of ''[[Ages of the World]]''. Nature in this frame is not about a balanced ecology; ecology is dark and chaotic, exposing us to contingencies up to and including its physical laws.<br />
<br />
In sum, across his many writings and seminars Žižek offers his readers an array of ways to conceive of ecology. The selection above is not exhaustive of the ways we may think ecology through Žižek’s work. However, the selection is indicative of the polymorphous avenues that Žižek’s thought is famous for pursuing. For Žižek’s thought, therefore, ecology may be immanent and totemic, institutional and symbolic, discursive and fantasmatic, or dark and contingent.</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Desire/Drive&diff=43754Desire/Drive2019-04-15T01:36:35Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Desire and drive are two closely interconnected concepts that run throughout Žižek’s oeuvre, relating to all of his major concerns: psychoanalysis, philosophy and politics. They do most obviously relate to psychoanalysis, of course, and much of Žižek’s discussion of them could be quite unproblematically described as the interpretation of [[Jacques Lacan]]’s work on them. But it is precisely by relating desire and drive in the psychoanalytic tradition to fundamental problems in both philosophy and politics that much of Žižek’s theoretical power and originality emerge. It is, in a way, “the big obsession of my entire work”, as he told [[Glyn Daly]], to read “the Freudian notion of death drive with what in German idealism is rendered thematic as self-relating negativity” (''CŽ'': 61).<br />
<br />
=== Desire ===<br />
Desire, according to Lacan, is always the desire of the Other, which means that it is a fundamentally intersubjective phenomenon and has a rather elusive character. It is different from mere biological need (thirst, hunger, cold) in that it cannot easily be satisfied. Indeed, strictly speaking, it cannot be satisfied at all. What we desire are, namely, not just objects, like drinks, clothes or bodies, but the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet a]]'', which is really not an object (in the sense of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy) at all, but the object-cause of desire, that is, that which makes us desire concrete stupid objects like drinks, clothes or bodies. The ''objet a'' is the lost object, which we are looking for in everything and everyone around us: where is that which will make me “whole” again after entering language and a world of unpredictable surroundings, in which immediate and harmonious satisfaction is no longer possible?<br />
<br />
What I desire is the Other’s desire, meaning that I want the Other to desire me, and therefore I try to guess what the Other wants from me – what I could do to make the Other desire me. The things that I desire, my tastes, wishes, choices, are thus directly informed by what (I imagine) the Other desires. I wear these shoes, because I suspect that the Other would like (me to like) them. In ''[[The Plague of Fantasies]]'', Žižek makes use of a little anecdote told by Freud to illustrate this intersubjective character of desire. One night, Freud noticed that his little daughter Anna was apparently fantasizing about strawberries and ice cream in her sleep. If desire was merely a biological urge, one could reasonably say that, in her dream, she was articulating that she was hungry or that she was longing for the sweet taste of the berries. Žižek’s interpretation is entirely different: while the little girl was eating her treat during that day, she was most probably noticing her parents’ happiness in watching her enjoying, “so what the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake is really about is her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents, would make her the object of their desire” (PF: 9).<br />
<br />
Becoming a subject thus entails learning how to desire, and precisely because the ''objet a'' always evades us, we continue to learn how to desire throughout our lives. (Maybe they love me, when I am enjoying strawberries, but did I do it right this time? And can I be sure that they will continue loving me for that?) The capitalist economy, of course, thrives immensely on this [[Metonymy|metonymic]] logic of desire, where no meaning is ultimately fixed and every satisfaction is always provisional. Commercials instruct us how to desire, and every time we purchase some commodity, we sense that it is not “it”, anyway – and that we should therefore buy more stuff .<br />
<br />
=== Drive ===<br />
If that was all, however, becoming a subject would not be all that traumatic. The fantasized symbiotic state before castration might not be within our reach, but we could get some enjoyment out of objects and signs of love here and there, and, although a bit neurotically, always on the look- out for new forms of approval, we could probably learn how to get it more or less right and live relatively stable lives within the safe confines of fantasy. This picture, however, is too easily attained. It is in a way a sterile version of desire and of the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet a]]'' – what it lacks is precisely the dimension of the [[drive]]. Unlike much philosophical theory on ethical formation and language acquisition, Žižek finds one of his main interests not in the gradual transition from helpless infant to a competent (moral) agent, but in the fundamental impossibility of this transition; in the lack (of meaning) that it always leaves behind. The imposition of the symbolic order creates not only the perpetual question “What do they want from me?”, but also questions like “How did we get into this mess? And how do I get out again?” The symbolic order does not provide any justification of its existence (other than the [[signifier]] as such), and this lack, in a quite literal sense, cannot even be directly addressed – since we have only the language of the symbolic order itself to address it with.<br />
<br />
Drive is the subject’s answer to this fundamental impasse. It is not a repressed “natural urge” that must be domesticized, but on the contrary the most radical result of domestication itself. Much of the contemporary philosophy of formation and linguistic normativity (virtue ethics, Hegelian pragmatism, etc.) therefore entirely fails to recognize the crucial element in Žižek’s grasp of human subjectivity: the “[[The Night of the World|night of the world]]”, the madness of the transition from biology to culture. Human beings are not well-behaved animals that have gradually learned how to suppress their animal instincts, but much rather sexualized animals that have become sexualized by virtue of entering the domain of second nature. Therefore, “the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (''LN'': 499).<br />
<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Desire/Drive&diff=43753Desire/Drive2019-04-15T01:36:11Z<p>TheoryLeaks: Created page with "== In the work of Slavoj Žižek == Desire and drive are two closely interconnected concepts that run throughout Žižek’s oeuvre, relating to all of his major concerns: psy..."</p>
<hr />
<div>== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Desire and drive are two closely interconnected concepts that run throughout Žižek’s oeuvre, relating to all of his major concerns: psychoanalysis, philosophy and politics. They do most obviously relate to psychoanalysis, of course, and much of Žižek’s discussion of them could be quite unproblematically described as the interpretation of [[Jacques Lacan]]’s work on them. But it is precisely by relating desire and drive in the psychoanalytic tradition to fundamental problems in both philosophy and politics that much of Žižek’s theoretical power and originality emerge. It is, in a way, “the big obsession of my entire work”, as he told [[Glyn Daly]], to read “the Freudian notion of death drive with what in German idealism is rendered thematic as self-relating negativity” (''CŽ'': 61).<br />
<br />
=== Desire ===<br />
Desire, according to Lacan, is always the desire of the Other, which means that it is a fundamentally intersubjective phenomenon and has a rather elusive character. It is different from mere biological need (thirst, hunger, cold) in that it cannot easily be satisfied. Indeed, strictly speaking, it cannot be satisfied at all. What we desire are, namely, not just objects, like drinks, clothes or bodies, but the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet a]]'', which is really not an object (in the sense of Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy) at all, but the object-cause of desire, that is, that which makes us desire concrete stupid objects like drinks, clothes or bodies. The ''objet a'' is the lost object, which we are looking for in everything and everyone around us: where is that which will make me “whole” again after entering language and a world of unpredictable surroundings, in which immediate and harmonious satisfaction is no longer possible?<br />
<br />
What I desire is the Other’s desire, meaning that I want the Other to desire me, and therefore I try to guess what the Other wants from me – what I could do to make the Other desire me. The things that I desire, my tastes, wishes, choices, are thus directly informed by what (I imagine) the Other desires. I wear these shoes, because I suspect that the Other would like (me to like) them. In ''[[The Plague of Fantasies]]'', Žižek makes use of a little anecdote told by Freud to illustrate this intersubjective character of desire. One night, Freud noticed that his little daughter Anna was apparently fantasizing about strawberries and ice cream in her sleep. If desire was merely a biological urge, one could reasonably say that, in her dream, she was articulating that she was hungry or that she was longing for the sweet taste of the berries. Žižek’s interpretation is entirely different: while the little girl was eating her treat during that day, she was most probably noticing her parents’ happiness in watching her enjoying, “so what the fantasy of eating a strawberry cake is really about is her attempt to form an identity (of the one who fully enjoys eating a cake given by the parents) that would satisfy her parents, would make her the object of their desire” (PF: 9).<br />
<br />
Becoming a subject thus entails learning how to desire, and precisely because the ''objet a'' always evades us, we continue to learn how to desire throughout our lives. (Maybe they love me, when I am enjoying strawberries, but did I do it right this time? And can I be sure that they will continue loving me for that?) The capitalist economy, of course, thrives immensely on this [[Metonymy|metonymic]] logic of desire, where no meaning is ultimately fixed and every satisfaction is always provisional. Commercials instruct us how to desire, and every time we purchase some commodity, we sense that it is not “it”, anyway – and that we should therefore buy more stuff .<br />
<br />
=== Drive ===<br />
If that was all, however, becoming a subject would not be all that traumatic. The fantasized symbiotic state before castration might not be within our reach, but we could get some enjoyment out of objects and signs of love here and there, and, although a bit neurotically, always on the look- out for new forms of approval, we could probably learn how to get it more or less right and live relatively stable lives within the safe confines of fantasy. This picture, however, is too easily attained. It is in a way a sterile version of desire and of the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet a]]'' – what it lacks is precisely the dimension of the [[drive]]. Unlike much philosophical theory on ethical formation and language acquisition, Žižek finds one of his main interests not in the gradual transition from helpless infant to a competent (moral) agent, but in the fundamental impossibility of this transition; in the lack (of meaning) that it always leaves behind. The imposition of the symbolic order creates not only the perpetual question “What do they want from me?”, but also questions like “How did we get into this mess? And how do I get out again?” The symbolic order does not provide any justification of its existence (other than the [[signifier]] as such), and this lack, in a quite literal sense, cannot even be directly addressed – since we have only the language of the symbolic order itself to address it with.<br />
<br />
Drive is the subject’s answer to this fundamental impasse. It is not a repressed “natural urge” that must be domesticized, but on the contrary the most radical result of domestication itself. Much of the contemporary philosophy of formation and linguistic normativity (virtue ethics, Hegelian pragmatism, etc.) therefore entirely fails to recognize the crucial element in Žižek’s grasp of human subjectivity: the “[[The Night of the World|night of the world]]”, the madness of the transition from biology to culture. Human beings are not well-behaved animals that have gradually learned how to suppress their animal instincts, but much rather sexualized animals that have become sexualized by virtue of entering the domain of second nature. Therefore, “the ultimate lesson of psychoanalysis is that human life is never ‘just life’: humans are not simply alive, they are possessed by the strange drive to enjoy life in excess, passionately attached to a surplus which sticks out and derails the ordinary run of things” (''LN'': 499).</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Ren%C3%A9_Descartes&diff=43752René Descartes2019-04-15T01:29:14Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''René Descartes''' (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–1649) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. He is generally considered one of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age.<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Slavoj Žižek’s most extensive engagement with René Descartes occurs in ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology]]'', where Descartes’ meditations upon the cogito, that unknown thing that thinks, serve to launch Žižek’s explorations of the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' that orients the Lacanian subject of desire. Žižek returns to remap the uncertain cartography of the Cartesian cogito in [[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|''The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology'']], a book that “focuses on the reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity” (''TS'': vii). In both texts, Žižek’s interest in Descartes is quickly subsumed by his entanglement with a host of Descartes’ successors, most eminent among them [[Immanuel Kant]]. [[Jacques Lacan]], of course, was more heavily invested in Kant than Descartes. Indeed, as Žižek himself insists in his introduction to ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Lacan offers a fourth “critique of pure desire” (''TN'': 3) to supplement Kant’s tripartite critical philosophy. In what follows, I will provide a brief gloss of Kant’s critique of Cartesian idealism, in order to set the stage for Žižek’s post-Lacanian reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity. My remarks will focus on ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', for this book contains Žižek’s most extensive engagement with Descartes, and also, in its later chapters, foreshadows the absent centre of political ontology that haunts ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]''.<br />
<br />
Descartes’ aim in his ''[[Meditations on First Philosophy]]'' (1641) is to refute scepticism by overturning his unexamined beliefs in order to determine whether anything survives such a sweeping upheaval. His formulation of the basic problem of metaphysics is epistemological, and it reads: given the ontological chasm between mind and matter, how can we have certain knowledge of the material existence of anything at all? He concludes that we cannot, and thus follows that fundamental axiom of his: that the only certainty we may have is that, in so far as I think, “I am, I exist” (Descartes 2003: 25). What then is this “thinking thing” so defined by Descartes? His measured response: “A thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, does not will, and which also imagines and senses” (ibid.: 26). The Cartesian ''[[cogito]]'' is not to be equated with the machinery of the limbs, or with the vital principle that animates the body, nor is it reducible to the pineal gland ligature between the two; finally, it is not identifiable with the self-consistency of the ego as it fixes its gaze and arranges its look in the mirror. Rather, the ''cogito'' may be analysed by turning the mind away from the senses and towards the ''[[a priori]]'' conditions of thought, but it cannot be objectively “known”, sensibly “pictured” or even properly “imagined”. This explains the philosopher’s astonishment that what is most certain to him, the ''cogito'', is least known by him, and that what is most known by him, the sensible universe, is least certain of all.<br />
<br />
Kant’s critique of Descartes is concentrated in his “Fourth Paralogism: Of Ideality” in his ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' (1781/1787). He argues there that Descartes is at once an empirical idealist and a transcendental realist. Descartes’ transcendental realism resides in his mistakenly positing an absolute reality of things-in-themselves that exists independent of thought. This leads to an erroneous empirical idealism that undermines the certainty of outward appearances. The transcendental illusion that plagues Cartesian idealism gives rise to an epistemological error that consists in mistaking the problematic concept of a noumenal reality of things-in-themselves for an actual or transcendently real object domain that exists independent of thought. By way of contrast, Kant claims that his own critical philosophy couples transcendental idealism with empirical realism. The empirical realist does not posit a transcendent reality of things-in-themselves outside of appearances, but instead considers the material universe to be nothing more than appearances for our phenomenal understanding. Accordingly, the reality of appearances cannot be doubted in relation to some [[Noumenon|noumenal]] order of things as they really are, for reality, at least as we know it, really is restricted to the domain of appearances. Therefore, it follows that the reality of external appearances is no less certain than the internal reality of the cogito. Kant does not actually argue against such a noumenal order of things-in-themselves, but instead contends that whether such a noumenal reality exists independently of appearances is really no business of reason at all. More importantly, the proper business of rational philosophy consists in taking cognisance of the business that is in fact proper to it, which in this case means acknowledging the material reality of appearances and the transcendental ideality of the same.<br />
<br />
Žižek begins the first chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', “I or He or It (the Thing) Which Th inks”, by returning to the locus of this debate between Descartes and Kant concerning the ontological status of the ''cogito''. For Kant, the ''cogito'' is equated with the “I think” of transcendental apperception, and thus serves as the condition of possibility for all experience. But Kant resists the Cartesian manoeuvre of “hypostasizing” this transcendental function of the imagination into a noumenal thing. This is because, for Kant, such a substantializing manoeuvre moves beyond the realm of appearances to posit a substantial entity (call it the cogito, the soul or the ego) that exists outside of its transcendental functionality within the field of experience. Žižek aligns Lacan with Kant against Descartes, and he does so by making reference to Lacan’s formula of fantasy, which reads: “‘I think’ only insofar as I am inaccessible to myself qua noumenal Thing which thinks” (''TN'': 14). Stated otherwise, the subject of thought is only in so far as it is inaccessible to itself as the “Thing which thinks”. In fact, the lack of intuited content for the “I think” is constitutive of transcendental apperception in its formal resiliency to phenomenal comprehension, which explains the title for the first part of Žižek’s book, “The Cogito: The Void Called Subject”. What Lacan adds to this debate is that the fantastic itinerary of the subject of desire is to heal the wound introduced by the advent of the signifier, and by doing so, somehow to reclaim or fill the void that lies at its extimate centre. Th e “Thing which thinks” is thus the condition of possibility for all of my experience, but it is at the same time inaccessible to me as an agent of desire, and this very lack of being constitutes me as the subject that I am.<br />
<br />
According to Žižek’s Lacanian appropriation of Kant’s transcendental reformulation of the Cartesian ''cogito'', the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' occupies the structural gap in the symbolic matrix of desire. The ''objet petit a'' accordingly takes on an ambivalent resonance: on the one hand, it is the hard kernel of the Real that resists symbolization; on the other hand, it is nothing more than a fantasy of plenitude that is engendered by the void introduced by symbolization. Or, rather, it is both at one and the same time: it thus serves as a transcendental object that holds the place of lack, but only when this lack engenders the illusion of a plenitude that desire forever falls short of or fails to achieve. A leitmotif of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'' is that limitation precedes transcendence, at least from the dialectical (Hegelian) point of view of the Lacanian subject. Žižek accordingly writes that the main point of Lacan’s reading of Kant is that “the distinction between phenomena and the Thing can be sustained only within the space of desire as structured by the intervention of the signifier” (''TN'': 37). Thus, every object that is destined to fill the place of the lack in the subject is only another hallucinatory wish fulfilment, the first in the sublime and sublimated series of which the first is nothing other than the “thinking thing” secured by Descartes’ doubtful meditations, a cogitative role model Kant was only too quick to replicate, whether as a transcendental function of apperception or as the spontaneous agent of freedom. Indeed, in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek endorses [[Martin Heidegger]]’s criticisms of Kant, for in this later book Žižek reads Kant as belonging to the same tradition of modern subjectivity initiated by Descartes. Ultimately, Žižek will find that Heidegger followed Kant’s lead and abandoned the question of being, for his post-Kehre focus on the piety of thought and the dignity of the thinking being suggests that he too “recoiled” from the abyss of the transcendental imagination.<br />
<br />
I would like to conclude by gesturing towards how Žižek’s criticism of the Cartesian ''cogito'' feeds into his analysis of the complicity between [[radical evil]] and [[nationalism]]. In “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!”, the final chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Žižek claims that nationalism is a privileged form of radical evil. For Kant, radical evil consists in elevating sensuous or particular maxims (e.g. of self, wealth, ethnicity, religion, class and nation) over the universal law of reason. The fanatical nationalist presumes to have made phenomenal contact with the Good, and then proceeds to elevate this phenomenal object to the dignity of the Thing. Of course, from Žižek’s Lacanian perspective, limitation precedes transcendence, and thus the nationalist’s presumption to know the Good (in the form of the nation) is the epistemological equivalent to the pre-Cartesian philosopher’s presumption to know the Soul. Following Kant, Žižek is able to denounce this as a radically evil act of nationalist mystification. Yet, the question remains, does not the Lacanian settlement of the problem of finitude amount to the same hypostatization of the subject of doubt, only this time in the form of the barred or inaccessible subject of desire? In other words, does he not substitute an illusory object of his own in the place hollowed out by the Real – call it the cogito, the Thing that thinks, the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' or, indeed, the nation? Given Hegel’s profound mediation in Žižek’s Cartesian itinerary, if limitation precedes transcendence, then the obverse or Hegelian side of this injunction is that transcendence precedes limitation, which is one way of reading Žižek’s prescription for the absent centre of political ontology. The psychoanalytic cure consists in traversing the fantasy to its limit, and thus in revealing the void called subject that lies at its extimate centre. Žižek repeats Kant’s critical turn by following Lacan’s trajectory from a theoretical unveiling of the subject of desire to an ethical praxis that remains haunted by the spectre of the Cartesian cogito.<br />
<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Ren%C3%A9_Descartes&diff=43751René Descartes2019-04-15T01:29:02Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''René Descartes''' (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–1649) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. He is generally considered one of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age.<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Slavoj Žižek’s most extensive engagement with René Descartes occurs in ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology]]'', where Descartes’ meditations upon the cogito, that unknown thing that thinks, serve to launch Žižek’s explorations of the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' that orients the Lacanian subject of desire. Žižek returns to remap the uncertain cartography of the Cartesian cogito in [[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|''The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology'']], a book that “focuses on the reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity” (''TS'': vii). In both texts, Žižek’s interest in Descartes is quickly subsumed by his entanglement with a host of Descartes’ successors, most eminent among them [[Immanuel Kant]]. [[Jacques Lacan]], of course, was more heavily invested in Kant than Descartes. Indeed, as Žižek himself insists in his introduction to ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Lacan offers a fourth “critique of pure desire” (''TN'': 3) to supplement Kant’s tripartite critical philosophy. In what follows, I will provide a brief gloss of Kant’s critique of Cartesian idealism, in order to set the stage for Žižek’s post-Lacanian reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity. My remarks will focus on ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', for this book contains Žižek’s most extensive engagement with Descartes, and also, in its later chapters, foreshadows the absent centre of political ontology that haunts ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]''.<br />
<br />
Descartes’ aim in his ''[[Meditations on First Philosophy]]'' (1641) is to refute scepticism by overturning his unexamined beliefs in order to determine whether anything survives such a sweeping upheaval. His formulation of the basic problem of metaphysics is epistemological, and it reads: given the ontological chasm between mind and matter, how can we have certain knowledge of the material existence of anything at all? He concludes that we cannot, and thus follows that fundamental axiom of his: that the only certainty we may have is that, in so far as I think, “I am, I exist” (Descartes 2003: 25). What then is this “thinking thing” so defined by Descartes? His measured response: “A thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, does not will, and which also imagines and senses” (ibid.: 26). The Cartesian ''[[cogito]]'' is not to be equated with the machinery of the limbs, or with the vital principle that animates the body, nor is it reducible to the pineal gland ligature between the two; finally, it is not identifiable with the self-consistency of the ego as it fixes its gaze and arranges its look in the mirror. Rather, the ''cogito'' may be analysed by turning the mind away from the senses and towards the ''[[a priori]]'' conditions of thought, but it cannot be objectively “known”, sensibly “pictured” or even properly “imagined”. This explains the philosopher’s astonishment that what is most certain to him, the ''cogito'', is least known by him, and that what is most known by him, the sensible universe, is least certain of all.<br />
<br />
Kant’s critique of Descartes is concentrated in his “Fourth Paralogism: Of Ideality” in his ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' (1781/1787). He argues there that Descartes is at once an empirical idealist and a transcendental realist. Descartes’ transcendental realism resides in his mistakenly positing an absolute reality of things-in-themselves that exists independent of thought. This leads to an erroneous empirical idealism that undermines the certainty of outward appearances. The transcendental illusion that plagues Cartesian idealism gives rise to an epistemological error that consists in mistaking the problematic concept of a noumenal reality of things-in-themselves for an actual or transcendently real object domain that exists independent of thought. By way of contrast, Kant claims that his own critical philosophy couples transcendental idealism with empirical realism. The empirical realist does not posit a transcendent reality of things-in-themselves outside of appearances, but instead considers the material universe to be nothing more than appearances for our phenomenal understanding. Accordingly, the reality of appearances cannot be doubted in relation to some [[Noumenon|noumenal]] order of things as they really are, for reality, at least as we know it, really is restricted to the domain of appearances. Therefore, it follows that the reality of external appearances is no less certain than the internal reality of the cogito. Kant does not actually argue against such a noumenal order of things-in-themselves, but instead contends that whether such a noumenal reality exists independently of appearances is really no business of reason at all. More importantly, the proper business of rational philosophy consists in taking cognisance of the business that is in fact proper to it, which in this case means acknowledging the material reality of appearances and the transcendental ideality of the same.<br />
<br />
Žižek begins the first chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', “I or He or It (the Thing) Which Th inks”, by returning to the locus of this debate between Descartes and Kant concerning the ontological status of the ''cogito''. For Kant, the ''cogito'' is equated with the “I think” of transcendental apperception, and thus serves as the condition of possibility for all experience. But Kant resists the Cartesian manoeuvre of “hypostasizing” this transcendental function of the imagination into a noumenal thing. This is because, for Kant, such a substantializing manoeuvre moves beyond the realm of appearances to posit a substantial entity (call it the cogito, the soul or the ego) that exists outside of its transcendental functionality within the field of experience. Žižek aligns Lacan with Kant against Descartes, and he does so by making reference to Lacan’s formula of fantasy, which reads: “‘I think’ only insofar as I am inaccessible to myself qua noumenal Thing which thinks” (''TN'': 14). Stated otherwise, the subject of thought is only in so far as it is inaccessible to itself as the “Thing which thinks”. In fact, the lack of intuited content for the “I think” is constitutive of transcendental apperception in its formal resiliency to phenomenal comprehension, which explains the title for the first part of Žižek’s book, “The Cogito: The Void Called Subject”. What Lacan adds to this debate is that the fantastic itinerary of the subject of desire is to heal the wound introduced by the advent of the signifier, and by doing so, somehow to reclaim or fill the void that lies at its extimate centre. Th e “Thing which thinks” is thus the condition of possibility for all of my experience, but it is at the same time inaccessible to me as an agent of desire, and this very lack of being constitutes me as the subject that I am.<br />
<br />
According to Žižek’s Lacanian appropriation of Kant’s transcendental reformulation of the Cartesian ''cogito'', the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' occupies the structural gap in the symbolic matrix of desire. The ''objet petit a'' accordingly takes on an ambivalent resonance: on the one hand, it is the hard kernel of the Real that resists symbolization; on the other hand, it is nothing more than a fantasy of plenitude that is engendered by the void introduced by symbolization. Or, rather, it is both at one and the same time: it thus serves as a transcendental object that holds the place of lack, but only when this lack engenders the illusion of a plenitude that desire forever falls short of or fails to achieve. A leitmotif of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'' is that limitation precedes transcendence, at least from the dialectical (Hegelian) point of view of the Lacanian subject. Žižek accordingly writes that the main point of Lacan’s reading of Kant is that “the distinction between phenomena and the Thing can be sustained only within the space of desire as structured by the intervention of the signifier” (''TN'': 37). Thus, every object that is destined to fill the place of the lack in the subject is only another hallucinatory wish fulfilment, the first in the sublime and sublimated series of which the first is nothing other than the “thinking thing” secured by Descartes’ doubtful meditations, a cogitative role model Kant was only too quick to replicate, whether as a transcendental function of apperception or as the spontaneous agent of freedom. Indeed, in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek endorses [[Martin Heidegger]]’s criticisms of Kant, for in this later book Žižek reads Kant as belonging to the same tradition of modern subjectivity initiated by Descartes. Ultimately, Žižek will find that Heidegger followed Kant’s lead and abandoned the question of being, for his post-Kehre focus on the piety of thought and the dignity of the thinking being suggests that he too “recoiled” from the abyss of the transcendental imagination.<br />
<br />
I would like to conclude by gesturing towards how Žižek’s criticism of the Cartesian ''cogito'' feeds into his analysis of the complicity between [[radical evil]] and [[nationalism]]. In “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!”, the final chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Žižek claims that nationalism is a privileged form of radical evil. For Kant, radical evil consists in elevating sensuous or particular maxims (e.g. of self, wealth, ethnicity, religion, class and nation) over the universal law of reason. The fanatical nationalist presumes to have made phenomenal contact with the Good, and then proceeds to elevate this phenomenal object to the dignity of the Thing. Of course, from Žižek’s Lacanian perspective, limitation precedes transcendence, and thus the nationalist’s presumption to know the Good (in the form of the nation) is the epistemological equivalent to the pre-Cartesian philosopher’s presumption to know the Soul. Following Kant, Žižek is able to denounce this as a radically evil act of nationalist mystification. Yet, the question remains, does not the Lacanian settlement of the problem of finitude amount to the same hypostatization of the subject of doubt, only this time in the form of the barred or inaccessible subject of desire? In other words, does he not substitute an illusory object of his own in the place hollowed out by the Real – call it the cogito, the Thing that thinks, the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' or, indeed, the nation? Given Hegel’s profound mediation in Žižek’s Cartesian itinerary, if limitation precedes transcendence, then the obverse or Hegelian side of this injunction is that transcendence precedes limitation, which is one way of reading Žižek’s prescription for the absent centre of political ontology. The psychoanalytic cure consists in traversing the fantasy to its limit, and thus in revealing the void called subject that lies at its extimate centre. Žižek repeats Kant’s critical turn by following Lacan’s trajectory from a theoretical unveiling of the subject of desire to an ethical praxis that remains haunted by the spectre of the Cartesian cogito.<br />
<br />
[[Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Ren%C3%A9_Descartes&diff=43750René Descartes2019-04-15T01:28:47Z<p>TheoryLeaks: Created page with "'''René Descartes''' (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 yea..."</p>
<hr />
<div>'''René Descartes''' (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist. A native of the Kingdom of France, he spent about 20 years (1629–1649) of his life in the Dutch Republic after serving for a while in the Dutch States Army of Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange and the Stadtholder of the United Provinces. He is generally considered one of the most notable intellectual figures of the Dutch Golden Age.<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Slavoj Žižek’s most extensive engagement with René Descartes occurs in ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology]]'', where Descartes’ meditations upon the cogito, that unknown thing that thinks, serve to launch Žižek’s explorations of the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' that orients the Lacanian subject of desire. Žižek returns to remap the uncertain cartography of the Cartesian cogito in [[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|''The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology'']], a book that “focuses on the reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity” (''TS'': vii). In both texts, Žižek’s interest in Descartes is quickly subsumed by his entanglement with a host of Descartes’ successors, most eminent among them [[Immanuel Kant]]. [[Jacques Lacan]], of course, was more heavily invested in Kant than Descartes. Indeed, as Žižek himself insists in his introduction to ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Lacan offers a fourth “critique of pure desire” (''TN'': 3) to supplement Kant’s tripartite critical philosophy. In what follows, I will provide a brief gloss of Kant’s critique of Cartesian idealism, in order to set the stage for Žižek’s post-Lacanian reassertion of Cartesian subjectivity. My remarks will focus on ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', for this book contains Žižek’s most extensive engagement with Descartes, and also, in its later chapters, foreshadows the absent centre of political ontology that haunts ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]''.<br />
<br />
Descartes’ aim in his ''[[Meditations on First Philosophy]]'' (1641) is to refute scepticism by overturning his unexamined beliefs in order to determine whether anything survives such a sweeping upheaval. His formulation of the basic problem of metaphysics is epistemological, and it reads: given the ontological chasm between mind and matter, how can we have certain knowledge of the material existence of anything at all? He concludes that we cannot, and thus follows that fundamental axiom of his: that the only certainty we may have is that, in so far as I think, “I am, I exist” (Descartes 2003: 25). What then is this “thinking thing” so defined by Descartes? His measured response: “A thing which doubts, understands, affirms, denies, wills, does not will, and which also imagines and senses” (ibid.: 26). The Cartesian ''[[cogito]]'' is not to be equated with the machinery of the limbs, or with the vital principle that animates the body, nor is it reducible to the pineal gland ligature between the two; finally, it is not identifiable with the self-consistency of the ego as it fixes its gaze and arranges its look in the mirror. Rather, the ''cogito'' may be analysed by turning the mind away from the senses and towards the ''[[a priori]]'' conditions of thought, but it cannot be objectively “known”, sensibly “pictured” or even properly “imagined”. This explains the philosopher’s astonishment that what is most certain to him, the ''cogito'', is least known by him, and that what is most known by him, the sensible universe, is least certain of all.<br />
<br />
Kant’s critique of Descartes is concentrated in his “Fourth Paralogism: Of Ideality” in his ''[[Critique of Pure Reason]]'' (1781/1787). He argues there that Descartes is at once an empirical idealist and a transcendental realist. Descartes’ transcendental realism resides in his mistakenly positing an absolute reality of things-in-themselves that exists independent of thought. This leads to an erroneous empirical idealism that undermines the certainty of outward appearances. The transcendental illusion that plagues Cartesian idealism gives rise to an epistemological error that consists in mistaking the problematic concept of a noumenal reality of things-in-themselves for an actual or transcendently real object domain that exists independent of thought. By way of contrast, Kant claims that his own critical philosophy couples transcendental idealism with empirical realism. The empirical realist does not posit a transcendent reality of things-in-themselves outside of appearances, but instead considers the material universe to be nothing more than appearances for our phenomenal understanding. Accordingly, the reality of appearances cannot be doubted in relation to some [[Noumenon|noumenal]] order of things as they really are, for reality, at least as we know it, really is restricted to the domain of appearances. Therefore, it follows that the reality of external appearances is no less certain than the internal reality of the cogito. Kant does not actually argue against such a noumenal order of things-in-themselves, but instead contends that whether such a noumenal reality exists independently of appearances is really no business of reason at all. More importantly, the proper business of rational philosophy consists in taking cognisance of the business that is in fact proper to it, which in this case means acknowledging the material reality of appearances and the transcendental ideality of the same.<br />
<br />
Žižek begins the first chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', “I or He or It (the Thing) Which Th inks”, by returning to the locus of this debate between Descartes and Kant concerning the ontological status of the ''cogito''. For Kant, the ''cogito'' is equated with the “I think” of transcendental apperception, and thus serves as the condition of possibility for all experience. But Kant resists the Cartesian manoeuvre of “hypostasizing” this transcendental function of the imagination into a noumenal thing. This is because, for Kant, such a substantializing manoeuvre moves beyond the realm of appearances to posit a substantial entity (call it the cogito, the soul or the ego) that exists outside of its transcendental functionality within the field of experience. Žižek aligns Lacan with Kant against Descartes, and he does so by making reference to Lacan’s formula of fantasy, which reads: “‘I think’ only insofar as I am inaccessible to myself qua noumenal Thing which thinks” (''TN'': 14). Stated otherwise, the subject of thought is only in so far as it is inaccessible to itself as the “Thing which thinks”. In fact, the lack of intuited content for the “I think” is constitutive of transcendental apperception in its formal resiliency to phenomenal comprehension, which explains the title for the first part of Žižek’s book, “The Cogito: The Void Called Subject”. What Lacan adds to this debate is that the fantastic itinerary of the subject of desire is to heal the wound introduced by the advent of the signifier, and by doing so, somehow to reclaim or fill the void that lies at its extimate centre. Th e “Thing which thinks” is thus the condition of possibility for all of my experience, but it is at the same time inaccessible to me as an agent of desire, and this very lack of being constitutes me as the subject that I am.<br />
<br />
According to Žižek’s Lacanian appropriation of Kant’s transcendental reformulation of the Cartesian ''cogito'', the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' occupies the structural gap in the symbolic matrix of desire. The ''objet petit a'' accordingly takes on an ambivalent resonance: on the one hand, it is the hard kernel of the Real that resists symbolization; on the other hand, it is nothing more than a fantasy of plenitude that is engendered by the void introduced by symbolization. Or, rather, it is both at one and the same time: it thus serves as a transcendental object that holds the place of lack, but only when this lack engenders the illusion of a plenitude that desire forever falls short of or fails to achieve. A leitmotif of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'' is that limitation precedes transcendence, at least from the dialectical (Hegelian) point of view of the Lacanian subject. Žižek accordingly writes that the main point of Lacan’s reading of Kant is that “the distinction between phenomena and the Thing can be sustained only within the space of desire as structured by the intervention of the signifier” (''TN'': 37). Thus, every object that is destined to fill the place of the lack in the subject is only another hallucinatory wish fulfilment, the first in the sublime and sublimated series of which the first is nothing other than the “thinking thing” secured by Descartes’ doubtful meditations, a cogitative role model Kant was only too quick to replicate, whether as a transcendental function of apperception or as the spontaneous agent of freedom. Indeed, in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek endorses [[Martin Heidegger]]’s criticisms of Kant, for in this later book Žižek reads Kant as belonging to the same tradition of modern subjectivity initiated by Descartes. Ultimately, Žižek will find that Heidegger followed Kant’s lead and abandoned the question of being, for his post-Kehre focus on the piety of thought and the dignity of the thinking being suggests that he too “recoiled” from the abyss of the transcendental imagination.<br />
<br />
I would like to conclude by gesturing towards how Žižek’s criticism of the Cartesian ''cogito'' feeds into his analysis of the complicity between [[radical evil]] and [[nationalism]]. In “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!”, the final chapter of ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'', Žižek claims that nationalism is a privileged form of radical evil. For Kant, radical evil consists in elevating sensuous or particular maxims (e.g. of self, wealth, ethnicity, religion, class and nation) over the universal law of reason. The fanatical nationalist presumes to have made phenomenal contact with the Good, and then proceeds to elevate this phenomenal object to the dignity of the Thing. Of course, from Žižek’s Lacanian perspective, limitation precedes transcendence, and thus the nationalist’s presumption to know the Good (in the form of the nation) is the epistemological equivalent to the pre-Cartesian philosopher’s presumption to know the Soul. Following Kant, Žižek is able to denounce this as a radically evil act of nationalist mystification. Yet, the question remains, does not the Lacanian settlement of the problem of finitude amount to the same hypostatization of the subject of doubt, only this time in the form of the barred or inaccessible subject of desire? In other words, does he not substitute an illusory object of his own in the place hollowed out by the Real – call it the cogito, the Thing that thinks, the ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' or, indeed, the nation? Given Hegel’s profound mediation in Žižek’s Cartesian itinerary, if limitation precedes transcendence, then the obverse or Hegelian side of this injunction is that transcendence precedes limitation, which is one way of reading Žižek’s prescription for the absent centre of political ontology. The psychoanalytic cure consists in traversing the fantasy to its limit, and thus in revealing the void called subject that lies at its extimate centre. Žižek repeats Kant’s critical turn by following Lacan’s trajectory from a theoretical unveiling of the subject of desire to an ethical praxis that remains haunted by the spectre of the Cartesian cogito.</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Jacques_Derrida&diff=43749Jacques Derrida2019-04-15T01:17:43Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Jacques Derrida''' (July 15, 1930 &ndash; October 8, 2004) was an [[Algeria]]n-born [[France|French]] [[literary critic]] and [[philosopher]] of [[Jew]]ish descent, most often referenced as the founder of "[[deconstruction]]" or, by more unsympathetic theorists, "[[Jacques Derrida|deconstructionism]]". <br />
* [[Slavoj Žižek|Žižek, Slavoj]]. ''[[The Ticklish Subject|The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]''. London: Verso, 1999. pp. 158-9<br />
: Abraham's sacrifice 321-2<br />
: Descartes's withdrawal-into-self 34<br />
: on Heidegger 9-10<br />
: ontology versus heauntology 238<br />
: pure notion of gift 56<br />
: On the Spint 9<br />
* {{Z}} ''[[The Fragile Absolute|The Fragile Absolute, or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For]]''. London and New York: Verso. p. 47<br />
* {{Z}} ''[[Conversations with Žižek|Conversations with Žižek: Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly]]''. London: Polity Press, 2004. pp. 5, 29-30, 46-7, 103<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Žižek’s encounters with Derrida belong to a tradition of mutual Lacanian– Derridean agonistics in which Derrida’s thinking was initially dismissed as mere “textualism”. From the reminder that phenomena take recognizable shape only through interpretative artifice, and that an irreducible gap remains between event and its linguistic description (Derrida 1976: 158), it was too quickly concluded that Derrida eradicates any referent and, in an auto-created world of self-referential textuality, celebrates a free play of differences without purchase on reality and too playfully ironic to be practically relevant.<br />
<br />
Sensitive to Derrida’s (Derrida 2003: 87–8) objections, Žižek belongs to another generation of critics. Retaining the assumption that Derrida sharply divides text from referent, or equally “phenomenal” from “absolute Other”, Žižek’s charge is the reverse of textual narcissism (“Th e Real of Sexual Diff erence”). Supposedly, in a Levinasian about-turn, the “later Derrida” negates the textual imagination (e.g. legal systems, political measures) to preserve a pure, transcendent referent (a hypostatized absolute Other such as justice itself). “Derrida’s operation”, Žižek argues, merely turns from “textualism” to a different, but equally practically impotent, impossibility. He argues that Lacanian logic, represented ''inter alia'' through Lacan’s “Borromean knot”, copes better with the complexities of ethical practice.<br />
<br />
The Lacan–Derrida encounter is consistently based on mutual misconstrual, and Žižek’s reading is no exception. However, unpacking his misinterpretation of Derrida’s operation has the value of clarifying Lacan’s ontological stance concerning the traumatic Real and the complex logic of human appropriation, which, incidentally, finds allegiance, not opposition, in Derrida’s operation, properly understood in terms of the “plural logic of the aporia”.<br />
<br />
Using Creon and Antigone as metonyms for two extreme attitudes (“unprincipled pragmatism” and “totalitarianism”), Žižek takes up Derrida’s insistence that one ignores at one’s peril the irreducible gap between economic, phenomenal reality (the human law Creon invokes) and the aneconomic, transcendent Divine Other (obeyed by Antigone). To close the gap by denying all transcendent Otherness in the name of phenomenal reality can only be to promote the unprincipled pragmatism exemplified by Creon, whose refusal to contravene the letter of human law makes of him “a pragmatic state politician, mercilessly crushing any activity that would destabilize the smooth functioning of the state and civil peace” (“The Real of Sexual Difference”: 68). However, to leave open the gap by submitting phenomenal reality to a hypostatized Divinity is instead to risk “totalitarianism”. Antigone remains blindly faithful to the singular call of the Divine, which nobody else can understand. As a proto-totalitarian, her “decision” to bury her brother is the result not of careful deliberation but of her insistence on her Divine, sovereign right to do just what she decides, whatever it is.<br />
<br />
Between unprincipled pragmatism and totalitarianism, one faces what Lacan (SXI: 210–12) calls “the mugger’s choice” (i.e. the injunction to choose “your money or your life”). Th is is no choice at all: a circularity persists whereby, in choosing one option, the other is lost; yet, because they are interdependent, this is also to lose the original choice. Negatively, in rejecting one option and gaining the other, one thereby regains the rejected original. Fearing the terror of singular totalitarianism, which threatens the social edifice, one might institute a shared, regulatory legal economy that aims instead for justice. However, the consequence of perfecting this economy by eradicating “evils” (unfairness, singularities, etc.) is not the hoped-for justice, but rigid prescriptions that apply badly “from above” to dynamic ethical realities. Ironically, when laws prevail over justice, law becomes totalitarian. Conversely, fearing the merciless strictures of unbending law, one might, like Antigone, answer to an anarchic, singular idea of “Justice itself” (“Th e Real of Sexual Difference”: 67). But all individuals, then, may legitimately apply personally held supreme principles at their own discretion. Th e consequence of this successful “totalitarianism”, where no overall principle suffices to arbitrate between power struggles, must be unprincipled pragmatism. Th is lose/lose circularity suggests that viable ethical practice cannot depend on either/or choices between binary opposites.<br />
<br />
On the impotence of binary thinking, Žižek and Derrideans concur. Žižek claims, however, that Derrida cannot off er an adequate heuristic to negotiate the “mugger’s choice” between immanence (Creon) and transcendence (Antigone), because his thinking remains trapped within a religious matrix that understands the Real in terms of sharply opposing ontological spheres. Derrida, for example, “retains the irreducible opposition between … the messianic call of justice and its ‘ontologization’, its transposition into a set of positive legal and political measures” (“Th e Real of Sexual Difference”: 65). Further, all “determinate economico-political measures” will betray the transcendent principle of, for example, justice because Derrida has merely replaced a problematic positive figure of the absolute Other, associated with the “metaphysics of presence”, with its equally problematic conception as a hypostatized absolute absence. Th is means that our relationship with the Other cannot be one of active hermeneutic uncovering. Instead, we must respect the purity of the absolute Other by renouncing any determinate structure involving real people in real circumstances and embracing a “primordial passivity, sentiency, of responding, of being infinitely indebted to and responsible for the call of an Otherness that never acquires positive features” (''ibid''.). This move, Žižek argues, underpins the unacceptable “lesson of deconstruction”: facing the impossible, we may justly renounce any demand for determinate decisions concerning practical measures.<br />
<br />
By contrast, Žižek adopts Lacan’s supposedly alternative understanding of the Real as one ontological region, whose “immanent transcendence” presents as trauma. Lacan argues that the Other can neither be hypostatized nor negated and thus, as Copjec notes, “eternally returns or repeats” (Copjec 2002: 96). The “hard kernel” of the Real that halts analytical interpretation because we cannot make complete sense of it is also a seed, as disseminative as différance, because we are obliged nevertheless to strive for sense. Th is describes the dynamic of immanent “sublimation”. It is in its determinate interpretations that an event is constituted as a phenomenon, but precisely because they cannot be definitive these interpretations themselves require interpretation. Th us the determination of an event endlessly calls for more determination and the event becomes self-transcending.<br />
<br />
To explain why Žižek’s encounter with Derrida is misconceived, one must address Derrida’s adjudication between phenomenology and Levinasian ethics in “Violence and Metaphysics” (Derrida 1978: 79–153). Ironically, Žižek’s critique of “Derrida’s operation” precisely echoes Derrida’s critique of Levinas for: (a) opposing a centripetal Greek spirit of totality (sameness, immanence, history, philosophy) to a centrifugal, eschatological, implicitly “Hebraic”, spirit of infinity (otherness, transcendence, ethics); (b) insisting on an abyssal gap between these poles; (c) assuming an either/or choice between supposed opposites; and (d) rejecting what he sees as violent, phenomenological “totalization” for the pure non-violence of an appeal to infinity, which he calls Ethics (Derrida 1978: 82–3). Derrida shows in multiple ways that Levinas’s insistence on the purity of the wholly Other remains inconsistent, since his discourse in fact requires the “contaminating” phenomenology he rejects (ibid.: 133). Derrida argues accordingly that we have no access to any pure spirit of non-violence, but can only choose the passage of least possible violence between the paralysing extremes of totality and infinity. This passage, he argues, is achieved better by Husserl than Levinas. For Levinas, the alterity of the wholly Other is respected only by abandoning hermeneutic uncovering. Phenomenology, by contrast, can tolerate the inescapable violence of active appropriation by accepting that inadequation (the impossibility of perfect evidence) marks transcendence. Th is imperfection accommodates both an indefinite potential in the other for phenomenality (for showing, illumination and evidence) and respects its alterity (its wonder, terror, surprises and secrets). Derrida does appreciate Levinas’s power to highlight the structural violation of otherness built into traditional philosophy (including phenomenology). Against strict Husserlian phenomenology, he launches an adapted wholly Other, which points not to an external Other in opposition to the sphere of immanence, but to the unpredictability inscribed within every immanent horizon of expectation, which opens all phenomena to potentially traumatic shattering. Th is precisely aligns his discourse with the paradox of “immanent transcendence” described in Lacan’s version of the traumatic Real.<br />
<br />
To deal with this ontology of immanent transcendence in order to show, for example, that genuinely ethical action is neither purely phenomenal (obedience to moral codes) nor a passive, abject response to the call of an inscrutable Other, both Lacan and Derrida develop complex logics of contamination. As Žižek explains, to understand the logical structure underpinning Antigone’s act as an act of decision rather than proto-totalitarianism, one must develop a “spectral analysis” of the “other” as a three-fold concept. Th e imaginary Other names other people like me (my neighbour as my mirror image); the symbolic “big Other” refers to the impersonal codes that coordinate intersubjective co-existence; and “the impossible Thing” indicates an unfathomable, monstrous otherness in every person (“The Real of Sexual Difference”: 70).<br />
<br />
Notably, this is aligned with Derrida’s contention that terms like “the other” cannot cohere, since they encompass incompatible senses, which can neither be reduced to one another nor ordered hierarchically. Instead, these senses are bound together in complex forms like the Borromean knot of circular opposition and interdependence. Here the linkage between them is such that each holds the other two together and apart in a tensioned relationship, and suspending one term engenders the collapse of the other two. To understand Antigone’s act, Žižek explains, one must first note that the monstrous Thing only becomes a “fellow human like me” through a third, mediating agency: the impersonal Symbolic Order to which all of us are willing to submit. To suspend the functioning of the Symbolic Order, as Antigone did, is to collapse the border between knowable “friendly neighbour” and unfathomable “monstrous Thing” (''ibid''.).<br />
<br />
Žižek argues that the ethical act, the moment of genuine decision, is made possible only when the symbolic order is suspended and the actual Antigone becomes the Thing. In this brief, passing moment of collapse, she herself becomes singular, unfathomable and inimitable. Th us she excludes herself from the networks that constitute communal life, becoming the traumatic cause of her own framework of value. But the moment of decision is fleeting. Caputo articulates precisely this insight in Derridean terms, where he argues that justice slips our grasp. To pin justice to an event by drawing maxims from a decision, or to individuals by calling them just, is to lose what justice “is”, for in the former case justice is reduced to the application of rules, whereas in the latter justice is reduced to a knowable character trait in the friendly neighbour. Justice “appears” only “in a singular action in a singular situation, and this only for the while that it lasts, in the instant of decision” (Caputo 1997: 138). This is just as well, for were this not the case no intersubjective life would be possible at all.<br />
<br />
To re-establish intersubjective life subsequent to the decisive moment, the world’s Antigones and their communities must come to terms with (make sense of, codify) the traumatic reconfiguration of value, and therefore face again Creon’s kind of unprincipled pragmatism that the decision disrupted. Derrida argues that without this circular predicament, there would be no call for decisions, but only calculative application of laws under the illusion that we know enough, or the abdication of responsibility under the illusion that we know nothing. But it is because individuals can neither know for sure nor claim absolute ignorance that we are subject to the singularizing trauma of making decisions and taking responsibility for them. The “lesson of deconstruction” sounds rather a lot like the “lesson of psychoanalysis”.<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:People|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Postmodern theory|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Looking Awry|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Jacques_Derrida&diff=43748Jacques Derrida2019-04-15T01:17:25Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
<hr />
<div>'''Jacques Derrida''' (July 15, 1930 &ndash; October 8, 2004) was an [[Algeria]]n-born [[France|French]] [[literary critic]] and [[philosopher]] of [[Jew]]ish descent, most often referenced as the founder of "[[deconstruction]]" or, by more unsympathetic theorists, "[[Jacques Derrida|deconstructionism]]". <br />
* [[Slavoj Žižek|Žižek, Slavoj]]. ''[[The Ticklish Subject|The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]''. London: Verso, 1999. pp. 158-9<br />
: Abraham's sacrifice 321-2<br />
: Descartes's withdrawal-into-self 34<br />
: on Heidegger 9-10<br />
: ontology versus heauntology 238<br />
: pure notion of gift 56<br />
: On the Spint 9<br />
* {{Z}} ''[[The Fragile Absolute|The Fragile Absolute, or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For]]''. London and New York: Verso. p. 47<br />
* {{Z}} ''[[Conversations with Žižek|Conversations with Žižek: Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly]]''. London: Polity Press, 2004. pp. 5, 29-30, 46-7, 103<br />
<br />
== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Žižek’s encounters with Derrida belong to a tradition of mutual Lacanian– Derridean agonistics in which Derrida’s thinking was initially dismissed as mere “textualism”. From the reminder that phenomena take recognizable shape only through interpretative artifice, and that an irreducible gap remains between event and its linguistic description (Derrida 1976: 158), it was too quickly concluded that Derrida eradicates any referent and, in an auto-created world of self-referential textuality, celebrates a free play of differences without purchase on reality and too playfully ironic to be practically relevant.<br />
<br />
Sensitive to Derrida’s (Derrida 2003: 87–8) objections, Žižek belongs to another generation of critics. Retaining the assumption that Derrida sharply divides text from referent, or equally “phenomenal” from “absolute Other”, Žižek’s charge is the reverse of textual narcissism (“Th e Real of Sexual Diff erence”). Supposedly, in a Levinasian about-turn, the “later Derrida” negates the textual imagination (e.g. legal systems, political measures) to preserve a pure, transcendent referent (a hypostatized absolute Other such as justice itself). “Derrida’s operation”, Žižek argues, merely turns from “textualism” to a different, but equally practically impotent, impossibility. He argues that Lacanian logic, represented ''inter alia'' through Lacan’s “Borromean knot”, copes better with the complexities of ethical practice.<br />
<br />
The Lacan–Derrida encounter is consistently based on mutual misconstrual, and Žižek’s reading is no exception. However, unpacking his misinterpretation of Derrida’s operation has the value of clarifying Lacan’s ontological stance concerning the traumatic Real and the complex logic of human appropriation, which, incidentally, finds allegiance, not opposition, in Derrida’s operation, properly understood in terms of the “plural logic of the aporia”.<br />
<br />
Using Creon and Antigone as metonyms for two extreme attitudes (“unprincipled pragmatism” and “totalitarianism”), Žižek takes up Derrida’s insistence that one ignores at one’s peril the irreducible gap between economic, phenomenal reality (the human law Creon invokes) and the aneconomic, transcendent Divine Other (obeyed by Antigone). To close the gap by denying all transcendent Otherness in the name of phenomenal reality can only be to promote the unprincipled pragmatism exemplified by Creon, whose refusal to contravene the letter of human law makes of him “a pragmatic state politician, mercilessly crushing any activity that would destabilize the smooth functioning of the state and civil peace” (“The Real of Sexual Difference”: 68). However, to leave open the gap by submitting phenomenal reality to a hypostatized Divinity is instead to risk “totalitarianism”. Antigone remains blindly faithful to the singular call of the Divine, which nobody else can understand. As a proto-totalitarian, her “decision” to bury her brother is the result not of careful deliberation but of her insistence on her Divine, sovereign right to do just what she decides, whatever it is.<br />
<br />
Between unprincipled pragmatism and totalitarianism, one faces what Lacan (SXI: 210–12) calls “the mugger’s choice” (i.e. the injunction to choose “your money or your life”). Th is is no choice at all: a circularity persists whereby, in choosing one option, the other is lost; yet, because they are interdependent, this is also to lose the original choice. Negatively, in rejecting one option and gaining the other, one thereby regains the rejected original. Fearing the terror of singular totalitarianism, which threatens the social edifice, one might institute a shared, regulatory legal economy that aims instead for justice. However, the consequence of perfecting this economy by eradicating “evils” (unfairness, singularities, etc.) is not the hoped-for justice, but rigid prescriptions that apply badly “from above” to dynamic ethical realities. Ironically, when laws prevail over justice, law becomes totalitarian. Conversely, fearing the merciless strictures of unbending law, one might, like Antigone, answer to an anarchic, singular idea of “Justice itself” (“Th e Real of Sexual Difference”: 67). But all individuals, then, may legitimately apply personally held supreme principles at their own discretion. Th e consequence of this successful “totalitarianism”, where no overall principle suffices to arbitrate between power struggles, must be unprincipled pragmatism. Th is lose/lose circularity suggests that viable ethical practice cannot depend on either/or choices between binary opposites.<br />
<br />
On the impotence of binary thinking, Žižek and Derrideans concur. Žižek claims, however, that Derrida cannot off er an adequate heuristic to negotiate the “mugger’s choice” between immanence (Creon) and transcendence (Antigone), because his thinking remains trapped within a religious matrix that understands the Real in terms of sharply opposing ontological spheres. Derrida, for example, “retains the irreducible opposition between … the messianic call of justice and its ‘ontologization’, its transposition into a set of positive legal and political measures” (“Th e Real of Sexual Difference”: 65). Further, all “determinate economico-political measures” will betray the transcendent principle of, for example, justice because Derrida has merely replaced a problematic positive figure of the absolute Other, associated with the “metaphysics of presence”, with its equally problematic conception as a hypostatized absolute absence. Th is means that our relationship with the Other cannot be one of active hermeneutic uncovering. Instead, we must respect the purity of the absolute Other by renouncing any determinate structure involving real people in real circumstances and embracing a “primordial passivity, sentiency, of responding, of being infinitely indebted to and responsible for the call of an Otherness that never acquires positive features” (''ibid''.). This move, Žižek argues, underpins the unacceptable “lesson of deconstruction”: facing the impossible, we may justly renounce any demand for determinate decisions concerning practical measures.<br />
<br />
By contrast, Žižek adopts Lacan’s supposedly alternative understanding of the Real as one ontological region, whose “immanent transcendence” presents as trauma. Lacan argues that the Other can neither be hypostatized nor negated and thus, as Copjec notes, “eternally returns or repeats” (Copjec 2002: 96). The “hard kernel” of the Real that halts analytical interpretation because we cannot make complete sense of it is also a seed, as disseminative as différance, because we are obliged nevertheless to strive for sense. Th is describes the dynamic of immanent “sublimation”. It is in its determinate interpretations that an event is constituted as a phenomenon, but precisely because they cannot be definitive these interpretations themselves require interpretation. Th us the determination of an event endlessly calls for more determination and the event becomes self-transcending.<br />
<br />
To explain why Žižek’s encounter with Derrida is misconceived, one must address Derrida’s adjudication between phenomenology and Levinasian ethics in “Violence and Metaphysics” (Derrida 1978: 79–153). Ironically, Žižek’s critique of “Derrida’s operation” precisely echoes Derrida’s critique of Levinas for: (a) opposing a centripetal Greek spirit of totality (sameness, immanence, history, philosophy) to a centrifugal, eschatological, implicitly “Hebraic”, spirit of infinity (otherness, transcendence, ethics); (b) insisting on an abyssal gap between these poles; (c) assuming an either/or choice between supposed opposites; and (d) rejecting what he sees as violent, phenomenological “totalization” for the pure non-violence of an appeal to infinity, which he calls Ethics (Derrida 1978: 82–3). Derrida shows in multiple ways that Levinas’s insistence on the purity of the wholly Other remains inconsistent, since his discourse in fact requires the “contaminating” phenomenology he rejects (ibid.: 133). Derrida argues accordingly that we have no access to any pure spirit of non-violence, but can only choose the passage of least possible violence between the paralysing extremes of totality and infinity. This passage, he argues, is achieved better by Husserl than Levinas. For Levinas, the alterity of the wholly Other is respected only by abandoning hermeneutic uncovering. Phenomenology, by contrast, can tolerate the inescapable violence of active appropriation by accepting that inadequation (the impossibility of perfect evidence) marks transcendence. Th is imperfection accommodates both an indefinite potential in the other for phenomenality (for showing, illumination and evidence) and respects its alterity (its wonder, terror, surprises and secrets). Derrida does appreciate Levinas’s power to highlight the structural violation of otherness built into traditional philosophy (including phenomenology). Against strict Husserlian phenomenology, he launches an adapted wholly Other, which points not to an external Other in opposition to the sphere of immanence, but to the unpredictability inscribed within every immanent horizon of expectation, which opens all phenomena to potentially traumatic shattering. Th is precisely aligns his discourse with the paradox of “immanent transcendence” described in Lacan’s version of the traumatic Real.<br />
<br />
To deal with this ontology of immanent transcendence in order to show, for example, that genuinely ethical action is neither purely phenomenal (obedience to moral codes) nor a passive, abject response to the call of an inscrutable Other, both Lacan and Derrida develop complex logics of contamination. As Žižek explains, to understand the logical structure underpinning Antigone’s act as an act of decision rather than proto-totalitarianism, one must develop a “spectral analysis” of the “other” as a three-fold concept. Th e imaginary Other names other people like me (my neighbour as my mirror image); the symbolic “big Other” refers to the impersonal codes that coordinate intersubjective co-existence; and “the impossible Thing” indicates an unfathomable, monstrous otherness in every person (“The Real of Sexual Difference”: 70).<br />
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Notably, this is aligned with Derrida’s contention that terms like “the other” cannot cohere, since they encompass incompatible senses, which can neither be reduced to one another nor ordered hierarchically. Instead, these senses are bound together in complex forms like the Borromean knot of circular opposition and interdependence. Here the linkage between them is such that each holds the other two together and apart in a tensioned relationship, and suspending one term engenders the collapse of the other two. To understand Antigone’s act, Žižek explains, one must first note that the monstrous Thing only becomes a “fellow human like me” through a third, mediating agency: the impersonal Symbolic Order to which all of us are willing to submit. To suspend the functioning of the Symbolic Order, as Antigone did, is to collapse the border between knowable “friendly neighbour” and unfathomable “monstrous Thing” (''ibid''.).<br />
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Žižek argues that the ethical act, the moment of genuine decision, is made possible only when the symbolic order is suspended and the actual Antigone becomes the Thing. In this brief, passing moment of collapse, she herself becomes singular, unfathomable and inimitable. Th us she excludes herself from the networks that constitute communal life, becoming the traumatic cause of her own framework of value. But the moment of decision is fleeting. Caputo articulates precisely this insight in Derridean terms, where he argues that justice slips our grasp. To pin justice to an event by drawing maxims from a decision, or to individuals by calling them just, is to lose what justice “is”, for in the former case justice is reduced to the application of rules, whereas in the latter justice is reduced to a knowable character trait in the friendly neighbour. Justice “appears” only “in a singular action in a singular situation, and this only for the while that it lasts, in the instant of decision” (Caputo 1997: 138). This is just as well, for were this not the case no intersubjective life would be possible at all.<br />
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To re-establish intersubjective life subsequent to the decisive moment, the world’s Antigones and their communities must come to terms with (make sense of, codify) the traumatic reconfiguration of value, and therefore face again Creon’s kind of unprincipled pragmatism that the decision disrupted. Derrida argues that without this circular predicament, there would be no call for decisions, but only calculative application of laws under the illusion that we know enough, or the abdication of responsibility under the illusion that we know nothing. But it is because individuals can neither know for sure nor claim absolute ignorance that we are subject to the singularizing trauma of making decisions and taking responsibility for them. The “lesson of deconstruction” sounds rather a lot like the “lesson of psychoanalysis”.<br />
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==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:People|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Postmodern theory|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek|Derrida, Jacques]]<br />
[[Category:Looking Awry|Derrida, Jacques]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Democracy&diff=43747Democracy2019-04-15T01:10:06Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div><br />
==suspension==<br />
<blockquote><br />
Democracy is not merely the “power of, by, and for the people.” It is not enough just to claim that, in democracy, the will and the interests (the two in no way automatically coincide) of the large majority determine state decisions. Democracy—in the way the term is used today—concerns, above all, ‘’’formal legalism’’’. Its minimal definition is ‘’the unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the “rules of the game.”’’’<br />
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“Democracy” means that, whatever electoral manipulation actually takes place, every political agent will unconditionally respect the results. In this sense, the U.S. presidential elections of 2000 were effectively “democratic.” Despite obvious and patent electoral manipulations in Florida, the Democratic candidate accepted his defeat. In the weeks of uncertainty after the elections, Bill Clinton made an appropriately acerbic comment: “The American people have spoken. We just don’t know what they said.” This comment should have been taken more seriously than it was meant, for it revealed how the present machinery of democracy can be problematic, to say the least. ‘’’Why should the left always and unconditionally respect the formal “rules of the game”? Why should it not, in some circumstances, put in question the legitimacy of the outcome of a formal democratic procedure?’’’<ref>[[How Much Democracy Is Too Much?]]</ref></blockquote><br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Slavoj Žižek’s thinking with regard to political democracy is ambivalent, or nuanced, in several ways. It has gone through two broad phases. In his earliest works published in English, principally ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', Žižek appears to advocate a form of [[radical democracy]], close to the positions of [[Ernesto Laclau]], [[Chantal Mouffe]] and [[Yannis Stavrakakis]]. Since the mid-1990s, however, Žižek has become increasingly critical of democracy as a political regime, and “democracy” as a [[signifier]] around which any [[radical politics]] worthy of the name might be organized.<br />
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Žižek’s early advocacy of radical democracy is rooted in his wider Lacanian premises and theory of political power. According to this position, subjects’ commitments to political regimes are never wholly symbolic, or explicable in terms of their complete [[identification]] with the regimes’ symbolic ideals (like freedom, the party, the nation …). Th is identification is rooted in what he terms a “disidentification”, wherein [[Subject|the subject]] abides by the symbolic regime on the basis of accepting a set of more or less unconscious fantasies about political [[enjoyment]]. Centrally, such fantasies posit some Others [[supposed to enjoy]], or threatening to thieve, “our” [[jouissance]] or “way of life” – like the Muslims who [[George W. Bush]] assured us after September 2001 “hate our freedoms”, but one can think also of single mothers, the unemployed, new immigrants, and so on. For Žižek, such fantasies are always internally inconsistent and often factually erroneous, since they are really there to cover over the lack in our [[big Other]] or [[symbolic order]]: the fact that our regime, nation or community does not exist as a fully coherent, just, content and solidary symbolic order. The task of a Lacanian critique of [[ideology]] then becomes to show how these fantasies are inconsistent, in order to attack the real, motivating foundations of subjects’ identifications with them, rather than simply unmasking their symbolic ideals. In this light, ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'' defends a radical political democracy as, paradoxically, the only political regime that can institutionalize its own lack. Following [[Claude Lefort]], Žižek describes this in terms of democracy’s keeping empty of the place of power, formerly occupied by [[theologically]] or absolutely sanctioned [[monarchs]]. Thus, Žižek writes:<blockquote>It is against this background of the emptying of the place of power that we can measure the break introduced by the “democratic invention” ([[Claude Lefort|Lefort]]) in the history of [political] institutions: “democratic society” could be determined as a society whose institutional structure includes, as a part of its “normal”, “regular” reproduction, the moment of dissolution of the socio-symbolic bond, the moment of eruption of the [[Real, the (Lacan)|Real]]: elections. Lefort interprets elections … as an act of symbolic dissolution of [the] social edifice. (''SO'': 146–7)</blockquote>Yet Žižek’s defence of a radical democratic position was, even in his early works, qualified by deep criticisms of really existing Western [[liberal democracies]]. In particular, from early works like ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology|Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', ''[[Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture|Looking Awry]]'' and ''[[Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology|Tarrying with the Negative]]'' onwards, Žižek argued that the growing consumerism of Western liberal democracies after the [[Second World War]] – as against its political institutions – represents a fairly pure, and powerful, form of [[ideology]]. Far from allowing us to express our freedom, [[consumerism]] embodies a [[superego]] imperative to enjoy without cease, which punishes us should we fail to meet its demands. In more recent works, this critique is developed in terms of a wider critique of consumerist [[capitalism]] as a “[[post-Oedipal]]” regime, wherein the decline of subjects’ faith in public, symbolic authority engenders a deeply [[Perversion|perverse]], [[cynical]] mode of [[subjectivity]]. Th e flipside of today’s “[[politically correct]]” commitment to [[multiculturalism]] and value pluralism, Žižek argues, is [[anxiety]] about the over-proximity of Others formerly kept at bay by shared symbolic commitments. We are hence today more subjected than ever to a host of cloying, [[maternal prohibitions]] – one can drink coffee, so long as it is decaff einated; have open sexual relationships, so long as one uses contraception; smoke only in designated areas, and so on. Frustration at this “[[political correctness]]”, and its repression of all [[social antagonism]], Žižek suggests, goes a long way to explaining the recent decades’ resurgence of right-wing “[[parapolitics]]”, aiming to reinstate by authoritarian means a sense of symbolic, cultural boundaries.<br />
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Žižek’s more openly para-Marxist turn between 1997 and 1999 has seen a larger shift in his attitude, both towards really existing liberal democracies and towards radical democratic politics as a proposed critical alternative to them. Broadly speaking, Žižek has embraced a version of the old [[Marxist]] critique of [[liberal democracies]], for which the “[[superstructure]]” of liberal freedoms (of press, conscience, association; from arbitrary arrest) is to be considered an [[ideological]] veil. What it conceals is the way that economic liberty, the freedom to trade in markets, together with the power of money and “market forces” in shaping public life, undermines the other liberal freedoms or renders them eff ectively empty or “formal”, while itself being far beyond the possibility of political contestation – if not itself an avatar of the [[Lacanian Real]] that always returns to the same place.<br />
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Th is criticism of the really existing capitalist democracies has implications for how Žižek has come to understand what might truly oppose today’s [[hegemonic]] [[neo-liberal]] regimes. His claim is that advocacy of “radical democracy” is bound to remain inefficacious – indeed, it will simply imitate [[liberalism]]’s own ideological obfuscation of the determinant role of the economy – unless it politicizes the economy. As Žižek has written:<blockquote>We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of [[the political]], and it is an [[illusion]] that one can change them by “extending” democracy: say, by setting up “democratic” banks under the people’s control. (“[[Democracy is the Enemy]]”)</blockquote>Yet, he complains, [[the cultural turn]] in much Western “[[postmodern]]” [[theory]] has insulated economics from critical and political concern every bit as thoroughly as [[neo-liberalism]] itself: “The depoliticised economy is the disavowed ‘[[fundamental fantasy]]’ of postmodern politics – [hence] a properly [[political act]] would necessarily entail the repoliticisation of the economy” (TS: 355). It is this reason that underlies Žižek’s increasingly polemical break with figures advocating radical democracy like [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]], [[Simon Critchley]] and [[Stavrakakis]]. Indeed, in writings since 2006, particularly around the time of the [[global financial crisis]], Žižek has increasingly drawn upon [[Alain Badiou]]’s much more hostile post-[[Maoist]] stance towards a form of nominally “democratic” radical politics, instead advocating for the “[[idea of communism]]”, or even a “[[dictatorship of the proletariat]]”, and claiming that “the name of the ultimate enemy today is not [[capitalism]], empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy” (“[[Democracy is the Enemy]]”).<br />
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==References==<br />
<references /><br />
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[[Category:Politics]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Gilles_Deleuze&diff=43746Gilles Deleuze2019-04-15T01:09:47Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>'''Gilles Deleuze''' ((January 18, 1925 - November 4, 1995), French [[philosopher]] of the late 20th century. <br />
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From the early 1960s until his death, Deleuze wrote many influential works on [[philosophy]], [[literature]], [[film]], and fine art. <br />
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His most popular books were the two volumes of [[Gilles Deleuze|Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus]] (1972) and [[Gilles Deleuze|A Thousand Plateaus]] (1980), both co-written with [[Félix Guattari]]<br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Žižek’s most famous engagement with Deleuze takes place in ''[[Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences]]''. Žižek seeks to parse there both the theoretical and practical components of Deleuze’s philosophy from a Lacanian perspective. Žižek values Deleuze as a critic of psychoanalysis, a figure supplying theoretical underpinnings for materialist and anti-capitalist activism, and an all-around staple of leftist academic thought. In ''[[Organs without Bodies]]'', Žižek challenges some fundamental assumptions about Deleuze’s [[materialism]], namely the tensions within his oeuvre regarding the nature of becoming. Žižek insists that there are two Deleuzes. The more accepted Deleuze champions the multitudinous nature of becoming in ''[[Anti-Oedipus]]''. However, the second Deleuze is much more aligned with [[Jacques Lacan|Lacanian]] and [[Hegelian]] thought. The title of Žižek’s book is meant to expose those aspects of Deleuze’s thought that situate him, ostensibly, on the ideologically suspect side of contemporary digital [[capitalism]]. Žižek claims that in his intellectual privileging of flows of pure becoming Deleuze prefers the reality of the virtual to the reality of the material: potential trumps actual in this system. Reality for Deleuze, Žižek contends, is actualized through an “infinite potential field of virtualities” (''OWB'': 4). This is not unlike Lacan’s notion of [[the sinthome]], defined as “traces of affective intensities” (''OWB'': 5). For Žižek, [[affect]] is the key concept that aligns Deleuze with Lacan. In drawing an ontological distinction between being and becoming, Deleuze ascribes a transcendental quality to the process of becoming. Becoming, then, is closely aligned with [[repetition]] (another concept deeply significant to Lacan’s system of thought), for only in the repetition of becoming can the new emerge. In addition, by being [[Hegelian|anti-Hegelian]], Deleuze essentially repeats Hegel by supplying an antithesis that results in a dialectical production of something new. To Žižek this mode of repetition indicates Deleuze’s similarity to Hegel, in that both stress becoming through repetition. By becoming-other to Hegel, Deleuze ironically supports and augments his philosophy.<br />
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Deleuze’s approach to the body centres on [[becoming-machine]]. We are [[desiring-machines]] whose affects result from the interaction of external (supplementary) and internal parts. The interplay of the material and its “virtual shadow”, and the multiple singularities that erupt across this immanent plane, constitute Deleuze’s notion of “[[transcendental empiricism]]” (''OWB'': 19). The machinic explains why Deleuze reveres the medium of film. In this art form, for Deleuze, “gazes, images, movements, and ultimately time itself” are liberated from their place in discrete subjects. Instead, they flow through a literal machine: the camera (''OWB'': 20).<br />
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The political turn taken by Deleuze allegedly resulted from him being “[[Félix Guattari|guattarized]]” (ibid.). Evidence backing the claim that Guattari politicized Deleuze can be found by comparing and contrasting his early and late works. Žižek suggests that Deleuze turned to Guattari in an attempt to escape the deadlock resulting from his previous attempts to reconcile [[materialism]] and [[idealism]]. ''[[Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Anti-Oedipus]]'' (which Žižek calls Deleuze’s worst book) and ''[[The Logic of Sense]]'' encapsulate the two Deleuzes. Deleuze’s idealism involves acknowledging that bodily realities can be produced from virtual flows. Deleuze’s notion of the quasi-cause is helpful, in that it supplies an alternative to reductionism. Quasi-cause is the non-symbolic, non-linguistic and non-sensical [[event]] that disrupts the smooth flow and functioning of a fi eld. It is not unlike the jarring moment of the [[Real, the (Lacan)|Lacanian Real]]. Deleuze offers an Organ ''sans'' Body in the form of [[the Gaze]] in ''[[The Time-Image]]''. Again, Deleuze’s affirmation of an energy, an affect and an organ that is autonomous from bodies yet territorializes them resembles Lacan’s own theory of the Gaze. Subjects erroneously assume that they possess it, but it resides in an elusive point outside the subject. In both Deleuzian and Lacanian thought the gaze disrupts subjects, but is in them more than themselves.<br />
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Deleuze ultimately politicizes his philosophy by focusing on an immanent excess that is essential to [[revolutionary enthusiasm]] thought through the Lacanian lens of [[desire]]. [[Dialectical materialism]], in this Deleuzian system, can fruitfully benefit from understanding the autonomous flows of sense as ecstatic [[jouissance]]. This model can provide the tools to help [[the multitude]] organize. Tracing Deleuze back through [[Baruch Spinoza|Spinoza]], Žižek shows another connection to psychoanalysis: [[Partial object|partial objects]]. Partial objects quasi-cause desire; they mobilize it. Autonomous affects can fulfil this role, as can concrete [[Fetish|fetish objects]]. Understanding Deleuzian becoming through Spinoza, and eventually [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]] and [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]], is a process that Žižek colourfully refers to as “taking Deleuze from behind” (''OWB'': 45). Žižek philosophically “buggers” Deleuze, who himself used the term to describe how he would derive new meaning from twisting a philosopher’s concepts. Deleuze desires to produce monstrous off spring through buggery. In enacting the same practice himself, Žižek hopes to produce a monstrous off spring of himself and Deleuze that is “deeply Lacanian” (''OWB'': 48). Žižek wonders if Hegel, as a [[dialectician]], is the only philosopher who is immune to being buggered like this, because his thought-system has the practice built into it. Returning to Lacan, Žižek connects Deleuze’s concept of flat [[ontology]] to the systemic function of the Lacanian Real. Both hearken to a concept of [[constitutive excess]]. The true difference between Deleuze and Hegel involves divergent notions of [[flux]] and [[gap]].<br />
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Many of Žižek’s other works mention Deleuze, and most contain similar analyses to those found in ''[[Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences|Organs]]''. In ''[[The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality|The Metastases of Enjoyment]]'', Žižek unites Hegel, Deleuze and Lacan under the notion of [[the event]] and [[the logic of the signifier]]. He argues there that Deleuze’s notion of [[the Sense-Event]] attempts to [[suture]] the gap between words and things, thereby challenging [[Platonic]] notions of space by reconciling [[Ideas]] with their material copies. He also further engages with Deleuze’s responses to psychoanalysis. In ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', Žižek accuses Deleuze of misreading [[castration]] by failing accurately to conceptualize the role of [[the unconscious]]. Here, he outlines Deleuze and Guattari’s parsing of the disparity between production and reproduction, a [[binary]] that defines their stake in [[dialectical materialism]]. Deleuze’s dialectical materialism also emerges in ''[[The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality|Metastases]]'', where he mentions a problem that is allegedly both Deleuzian and Lacanian: the passage from bodily depth to surface event. Here, Sense and Gaze also align as autonomous forces that resist being pinpointed or assigned a [[cause]]. The passage from the penis to [[Phallus|the phallus]] is also ascribed to Deleuzian (through Lacanian) thought in ''Metastases'', as the phallus is described, by Žižek, as a [[master-signifier]] and figure of non-sense that structures an entire symbolic field; one that regulates and distributes sense. In this formulation we see another Lacanian–Deleuzian reconciliation. For Deleuze, penis versus phallus encapsulates the difference between form and content (the organization and coordination of sensible, erogenous zones). Here, Žižek also attests that Deleuze conflates bodily depth with [[transcendental]] depth, a crucial [[slippage]].<br />
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In ''Metastases'', Žižek also points out that Deleuze’s analysis of [[masochism]] rightly argued that [[sadism]] and [[masochism]] are asymmetrical. In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek praises Deleuze’s account of masochism for off ering an insightful formulation of [[Kantianism|Kantian]] moral law. In ''Ticklish'', he attributes to Deleuze a “[[perverse]] rejection of [[hysteria]]” by way of the latter’s alleged call for [[polymorphous perversity]], and the rejection of the symbolic master-signifier, in ''[[Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia|Anti-Oedipus]]'' (TS: 250). De- and re-territorialization ''vis-à-vis'' [[capitalism]] are also associated with Deleuze. More accounts of a politicized Deleuze are also to be found in ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', including distinctions between war machine and [[state apparatus]], a notion of “nomadic resistance” that implicates [[Antonio Negri]] (LC: 339), the economy as a [[quasi-cause]], revolutionary becoming and the notion of the [[post-human]].<br />
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In ''[[Less Than Nothing]]'', in addition to rehashing arguments found in earlier works (the phallus structuring the sensible field, Deleuze as Hegelian), Žižek develops his analysis of Deleuzian quasi-cause with respect to capitalism. Žižek argues that Deleuze “regresses” to the logic of representation, evidenced by his admission of money as subject. This is another example of capital as pseudo-cause, and the virtual as a site of production. Money, like the phallus, becomes a non-sense signifier that structures a field. Žižek has discussed Deleuze on the website [[Lacan.com]]. In the entry “[[Deleuze’s Platonism]]”, he challenges the notion that Deleuze is anti-Hegelian. Citing the interplay between the virtual and the actual as the zone of production for the new, he attests that this process is akin to the [[Dialectic|Hegelian dialectic]]. Deleuze opposes representation, yet understands ideas as materially real, creating a tension. In “[[Deleuze and The Lacanian Real]]”, Žižek asserts that Deleuze has landed in a trap through the notion of the virtual element present only in its effects, for [[negation]] and the absence of meaning (a [[signifier]] without a [[signified]]) is itself inscribed into a system of meaning. In sum, this last sentence appears to encapsulate Žižek’s fundamental critique of Deleuze: in attempting to do away with a dualistic system of meaning, Deleuze’s thought falls back into its binaries.<br />
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==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:People|Deleuze, Gilles]]<br />
[[Category:Postmodern theory|Deleuze, Gilles]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy|Deleuze, Gilles]]<br />
[[Category:Psychoanalysis|Deleuze, Gilles]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Deleuze, Gilles]]<br />
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek|Deleuze, Gilles]]<br />
[[Category:Looking Awry|Deleuze, Gilles]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Concrete_universality&diff=43745Concrete universality2019-04-15T01:09:17Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Any attempt to present a “Žižekian” position is fraught with difficulty, not the least of which is Žižek’s own rather unsystematic approach to doing philosophy. One must fish around in Žižek’s writings and try to piece together a unified and coherent doctrine, and the result will be at best tentative. My own approach is to take suggestions from his writings and then attempt to fill them out a bit, drawing out what I take to be their implications and trying to add flesh to the skeletal character of these hints and gestures that invite further enquiry. Although not a [[Martin Heidegger|Heideggerian]] [[Phenomenology|phenomenologist]], Žižek’s manner of writing philosophy might be characterized in a way similar to Heidegger’s own characterization of his writing as ''formale Anzeige'' – formal indications or hints that require the reader’s involvement and participation in opening up and disclosing the matter of enquiry in order to bring them to completion (Dahlstrom 1994).<br />
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The problem with the abstract universal is that it fails to include its particular content, thereby becoming itself something particular over and against the particulars it cannot include. In order for universality to become concrete, it cannot remain indifferent with respect to its particular content but must somehow include itself among its particulars (''TS'': 92). Th is stipulation provides us with a benchmark against which to measure whether or not concrete universality has been adequately conceived.<br />
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Žižek initially lists “three main versions of the relationship between [[the Universal]] and its particular content” (''TS'': 100). The first is “neutral” universality, exemplified by the [[René Descartes|Cartesian]] [[Cogito|''cogito'']], which is alike in all individual subjects, indifferent to ethnicity, gender, and so on. Even though neutral universality makes a general equivalence possible and so grounds political equality, when measured against Žižek’s benchmark we see that it does not include itself among its particulars but rather remains indifferent to its own non-neutral content and so falls short of concrete universality.<br />
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The second version is what Žižek calls [[“symptomatic” universality]], which regards neutral universality as a veneer behind which lies a very particular and arbitrarily privileged content, the exposure of which reveals neutral universality to be a pretence. For example, the supposed gender-neutral and colour-blind universality of the modern rights-bearing individual is unmasked and revealed to be the particularity of white male property owners. In its strongest statement this version indicts the very concept of universality ''per se'' as a form of domination that has an interest in downplaying or erasing particular differences behind a façade of neutrality that is actually loaded in favour of a particular party. But since this symptomatic version conceives universality as an ideological falsehood that is undermined by the particular content it conceals, universality once again is not included in its particulars but merely falls away as illusory and so fails to meet Žižek’s benchmark for concrete universality. This version more or less loses universality in [[particularity]].<br />
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The third version is “[[Hegemony|hegemonic]]” universality, for which Žižek looks to the work of [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]]. In this version the universal itself is purely formal and empty, standing in need of some particular content to fill it. Since it has no determinacy in itself that would specify its content, however, it can only be “hegemonized by some particular content that acts as its stand-in”. Universality in this sense is a kind of “battleground on which the multitude of particular contents fight for hegemony” (''TS'': 100–101). This battle can never be ultimately resolved, and with each temporary resolution a particular content in effect says “I am the true universal.” Once this is normalized (which we might regard as the sine qua non of winning the battle), a particular content comes to be seen as the default universal.<br />
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Žižek seems to favour this version in what he will also call a “struggling universality” (''PD'': 109), claiming that “each apparently universal ideological notion is always hegemonized by some particular content which colours its very universality” (TS: 175), and asserting that “a situation becomes ‘politicized’ when a particular demand starts to function as a stand-in for the impossible universal” (''TS'': 233). But does the hegemonic universal fulfil Žižek’s benchmark? In this version, universality does appear to come closer to including itself among its particulars in so far as it is “hegemonized by some particular content which colours its very universality”. Th e question, however, is whether this “colouring” belongs to universality ''per se'' or is merely the contamination by a particular content that cannot claim to be universal in its own right. If the latter, the status of the particular hegemon – whether dominant or oppressed – will not alter the fact that universality is once again a façade whose reality lies in a particular content, leaving us again with an abstract universal.<br />
<br />
Žižek states of the hegemonic universal that it “always asserts itself in the guise of some particular content which claims to embody it directly, excluding all other content as merely particular” (''TS'': 101). If we evaluate this version of universality by Žižek’s own benchmark, it can immediately be seen that the universal, in so far as it is an empty formality, not only cannot include itself among its particulars but cannot include any particulars at all. Far from being “concrete”, the universal is actually “[[Impossibility|impossible]]”, and hence some particular content must be substituted for it. Th e only thing that “asserts itself” is ''some particular stand-in'', ''not'' the universal itself, which as such remains an empty impossibility. In the end we wind up with particularity, not universality at all, and so the “guise” here would seem to be not universality in the guise of particularity but rather the other way around – a particular content in the guise of universality. Far from being included in its particular content, in this view universality as such is precisely excluded and replaced by a substitute.<br />
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Now although it may initially seem that Žižek favours the hegemonic universal, there is a further form of universality that Žižek indicates and that requires development. Taking the Lacanian phrase he employs here, I will call this version the “[[constitutive exception]]”. Although Žižek does approach this version by way of [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]] and it is not always clear from his account whether or not he conflates it with the hegemonized universal, I think that it is more promising to treat it as a distinct conception if we are looking for a concrete universality that is not an abstract neutrality, a façade concealing particular interests, or an empty formality hegemonized by some particular substitute that cannot claim normative validity. Indeed, Žižek suggests that:<blockquote>it is not enough to claim that concrete universality is articulated into a texture of particular constellations, of situations in which a specific content hegemonises the universal notion; one should also bear in mind that all these particular exemplifications of the universality in question are branded by the sign of their ultimate failure. (''TS'': 103)</blockquote>If the particular exemplifications that hegemonize universality are marked by their ultimate failure, this leaves open the possibility of a universality that might not be such a failure.<br />
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Žižek initially appeals to a musical analogy according to which a violin concerto functions as the universal and the actual violin concertos that are written and performed throughout its varied history count as the particulars. Here the particulars are not mere instances of a pre-given universal, but rather serve to actualize what the universal itself is, that is, they successively determine what counts as a successful violin concerto and thereby determine what the universal is. As Žižek puts it, this sense of the universal is:<blockquote>a process or a sequence of particular attempts that do not simply exemplify the neutral universal notion but struggle with it, give a specific twist to it – the universal is thus fully engaged in the process of its particular exemplification; that is to say, these particular cases, in a way, decide the fate of the universal notion itself. (TS: 102)</blockquote>The upshot here is that Žižek wants to see the particular cases as actually determining what the universal is, above and beyond being merely an instance of or a substitute for some predetermined idea of universality. If this process of determining is externally imposed – as, say, in the conception of a contingent particular content hegemonizing an empty universality – then the only “universality” present would be merely the power of asserting hegemony over others in the field that, as a mere particular power over and against those others, remains a false universal. On the other hand, if this process of determining necessarily follows in some way from the universal itself, or if the universal is determined by the particular cases in such a way that it remains a universal rather than a substitute, then the universal would indeed assert itself as its particular content and we would have a concrete universality by our benchmark, a universal that includes itself in its own particularity.<br />
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Further clarification of the constitutive exception is gained by Žižek’s argument that the [[Marxist]] notion of exploitation is not simply opposed to the idea of just and equitable exchange. That is, one cannot eliminate [[exploitation]] by merely ensuring that workers are paid the full value of their labour. Rather, exploitation lies in the [[commodification]] of workers themselves. When labour itself becomes a commodity that is exchanged on the market along with other commodities, exploitation comes into being – regardless of how well the workers are paid. In the midst of all the commodities exchanged on the market, one commodity stands out as an exception that does not belong with the rest – the human being who works. The exploitive relationship comes to light when the exception is made to function within an exchange system as if it were nothing more than another commodity alongside others.<br />
<br />
This emergence of exploitation through the exception in turn coincides with “the universalization of the exchange function: the moment the exchange function is universalized – that is, the moment it becomes the structuring principle of the whole of economic life – the exception emerges, since at this point the workforce itself becomes a commodity exchanged on [[the market]]” (''TS'', 180). Žižek’s point is that the process of [[universalization]] here (i.e. that of the exchange function) actually hinges on [[the exception]], making it a [[constitutive exception]]. The exception thus constitutes the rule rather than merely falling outside of it. If the exception were an exception in the everyday sense – that is, if it merely fell outside the rule of universal exchange – then the rule would not be universal. Its universality here consists in the inclusion under it of the exception, and hence it is only through the exception that it becomes the rule, that is, a universalized function. Invoking the symptomatic version of universality, however, Žižek asserts that the excessive element actually undermines universality: “[[The symptom]] is an example which subverts [[the Universal]] whose example it is” (''TS'': 180). But before we simply give up on universality, we have to consider whether it is universality ''per se'' that is undermined or merely the abstract form of universality whose neutrality conceals the particularity underlying it. If the latter, then there may still be room for a better conception of universality that is not so undermined.<br />
<br />
At this point, Žižek indicates a shift that has occurred in the analysis. Whereas previously a gap emerged between the universal itself (as an ideological illusion in the symptomatic universal or as empty formality in the hegemonic universal), on the one hand, and the particular content, on the other, now that gap has emerged within the particular content itself, that is, between the particular as assertion of universality and the exception within that particular content that subverts the universality it claims to be. Žižek keeps to his example here – the universality of justice is an empty formality whose content is hegemonized by the bourgeois notion of a just and equivalent exchange – but this particular stand-in for the empty universal necessarily includes the exploitive commodifi cation of human labour that undermines its pretension to universal justice. To put it another way, the gap between universal and particular now emerges within the particular itself – between the universal the particular claims to be and the constitutive exception within it that undermines that claim. To be sure, this universal is still seen to be undermined or “subverted”. Nevertheless, even as such a subverted universal, it now appears within the particular rather than being set off against it, and this brings us one step closer to the idea of a universality that includes itself among its particular contents. Th is is something neither the symptomatic nor the hegemonic universal could do, in so far as in these conceptions universality was always set off against the particular and so could not appear within it as universal.<br />
<br />
It is in and through this development that Žižek arrives at the “individual” or singularity, the third stage in the [[Hegelian triad]] of [[universality–particularity– singularity]]. The [[constitutive exception]] is singular in its exceptional character – it stands alone among the other particulars, not as a particular kind over and against them (which would make it only particular) but as an exception to the very idea that it is a “kind” at all. In other words, its exceptional character is the same thing as its subversion of the [[abstract universality]] of which it is supposed to be an instance, and it thereby stands out as singular.<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Communism&diff=43744Communism2019-04-15T01:08:54Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
<blockquote>Our message today should be: do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – time to get serious once again! (Žižek, ''[[First as Tragedy, Then as Farce|First as Tragedy]]'': 157)</blockquote>The impact of living under communist rule in Yugoslavia is apparent in much of Žižek’s writing, but only recently has the idea of communism been raised to the level of an authentic project in his political philosophy. Deemed a dissident in ex-Yugoslavia, Žižek nearly failed the defence of his doctoral dissertation because it was thought not to be Marxist enough, and he was prohibited from lecturing at the University of Ljubljana out of fear that he might lead students away from the official Party doctrine. Although moving closer to democracy by the late 1980s, running as the candidate for the Liberal Democratic party during the first post-Communist elections in Slovenia in 1990, Žižek’s politics have shifted over time from the “radical democracy” of [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]] and [[Chantal Mouffe|Mouffe]] – the influence of which is noticeable in his earliest English books, particularly [[The Sublime Object of Ideology|''The Sublime Object of Ideology'']] – towards a renewed interest in [[Lenin]] in the late 1990s (see [[Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917|''Revolution at the Gates'']]); and finally, more recently, Žižek has started identifying himself not only as a Marxist, but also as a communist. It is his new identification as a communist, and his own recent writing on the renewal of [[the communist hypothesis]], that led Žižek to co-organize the conference “[[The Idea of Communism]]” at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2009, and a second conference in New York City in 2012.<br />
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Žižek’s identification as a communist began shortly after [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]]’s call for a return to the communist hypothesis at the end of his book ''[[The Meaning of Sarkozy]]'' (2008). Badiou’s influence can be seen in the way that Žižek continues to take up the idea of communism in his recent writings, especially at the end of ''[[First as Tragedy, Then as Farce]]''. In this book, Žižek responds to Badiou’s statement that:<blockquote>The communist hypothesis remains the right hypothesis … If this hypothesis should have to be abandoned, then it is not worth doing anything in the order of collective action … Holding on to the Idea [of communism]… does not mean that its first form of presentation, focused on property and the state, must be maintained just as it is; in fact, what we are ascribed as a philosophical task … is to help a new modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being. (Badiou 2008: 115)</blockquote>Badiou, according to Žižek, does not propose a vision of communism as some kind of transhistorical [[utopian]] ideal. Rather, communism must be historicized in relation to actual historical problems and antagonisms. Conceiving communism as an “eternal idea” or ideal implies as well that the problems that give rise to this Idea are no less eternal. If we conceive the communist Idea as eternal, then the impossibility of ever overcoming actual historical antagonisms can be perceived as equally eternal.<br />
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For Žižek, the actuality of communism requires making reference to the crises and antagonisms within global capitalism that prevent indefinite production. These antagonisms are, according to Žižek, crises of “[[the commons]]”. Žižek describes the latter as “the shared substance of our being” (''FT'': 91) – that is, the actual material and intellectual resources upon which humanity as a whole is dependent. Žižek distinguishes three primary domains of the commons:<br />
* the commons of culture: socialized forms of “cognitive” capitalism, such as language, means of communication, education, as well as infrastructural commons, such as public transport, electricity, the postal system, and so on;<br />
* the commons of external nature: the threat of pollution, ecological damage, exploitation of natural resources (from oil to rain forests and the “natural habitat”); and<br />
* the commons of internal nature: the [[Biogenetics|biogenetic]] inheritance of humanity, creation of new “humanity”, the changing form of “human nature”, and so on.<br />
For Žižek, the privatization of the commons in these three domains justifies the resuscitation of “communism” and the communist hypothesis<br />
<br />
In ''[[First as Tragedy, Then as Farce]]'', but also in his contribution to the first “[[Idea of Communism]]” conference, “[[How to Begin from the Beginning]]”, Žižek indicates four central antagonisms that are related to the crises of the commons, each of which calls forth the resuscitation of the communist hypothesis:<br />
* the looming threat of ecological disaster;<br />
* the privatization of intellectual property;<br />
* the ethical implications of the new biogenetic technology; and<br />
* the creation of new forms of apartheid – that is, the antagonism between the included and the excluded.<br />
(''FT'': 91)<br />
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It is this last [[Class/Antagonism|antagonism]] that, according to Žižek, holds the key to the salvation of the crises of the commons. Th e universality of the struggle of the excluded is signalled by the enclosure of the commons – the by-product of which is increased [[proletarianization]] – and it is here that we find the ground upon which [[Emancipatory politics|emancipatory]] struggles must be fought (and won).<br />
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Žižek continues to note a significant difference between the “[[proletariat]]” and the “working class”: “to be a ‘proletarian’ involves assuming a certain subjective stance (of class struggle destined to achieve Redemption through Revolution) which, in principle, can be adopted by any individual” (''TS'': 227), while “working class” designates one’s position within the positive order of the relations of production. Žižek adds, though, that proletarianization is defined by the loss of subjective substance. Borrowing an expression from Marx in the ''[[Grundrisse]]'', Žižek often refers to the proletariat as “[[substanceless subjectivity]]” (see, for example, ''TN'': 10). [[Proletarianization]] must, therefore, be understood as a process of depriving [[the excluded]] subject of the substance of [[the commons]].<br />
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Žižek also clearly opposes communism to [[socialism]]. Regarding the latter, he indicates that “the commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism” (''FT'': 95) in two ways: either through an authoritarian-communitarian regime or through the return of the rootless subject to their place in a new substantial community. What he has in mind here are the two poles of authoritarian rule in countries like China and in Singapore and emerging forms of racist fundamentalism. Communism, then, has to be opposed to “socialism”. As he puts it: “While there may be a socialist [[anti-Semitism]] [as in the case of National Socialism], there cannot be a communist form” (''ibid.''). In the case of [[Stalinism]], the emergence of anti-Semitism is, according to Žižek, only an indication of a lack of [[fidelity]] to the [[Event|revolutionary event]].<br />
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Rather than avoiding the failed past of communism, Žižek insists that its resuscitation requires confronting fully past regressions of emancipatory movements into hierarchical rule, from the [[Jacobins]] to [[Napoleon]], from the [[October Revolution]] to [[Stalinism]] and from [[Mao Zedong|Mao]]’s [[Cultural Revolution]] to [[Deng Xiaoping]]’s [[authoritarian capitalism]]. In each of these regressions the communist Idea persists and survives in its failed realization as a spectre that haunts. It is in this sense that Žižek takes up communism as an [[eternal Idea]] (in some ways contradicting the position he takes earlier on the [[historicization]] of communism), with its own “[[four fundamental concepts]]”: egalitarian justice; disciplinary terror; political voluntarism; and trust in the people (''FT'': 125). However, he still insists that, up until our own historical moment, the Idea of communism persisted as a [[Platonic Idea]]. Today, this idea needs to be actualized in the context of real historical [[Class/Antagonism|antagonisms]] (''FT'': 126). <br />
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Socialism works towards solving the first three antagonisms, without addressing the final antagonism. By making this claim, Žižek asserts that socialism should no longer be seen as a lower phase of communism, but as the only other alternative to the crises of global capitalism; an alternative that can work only by relying on various forms of authoritarianism and populism, again leaving intact the antagonism between the included and the excluded. It is the reference to the excluded from the commons “that justifies the use of the term communism” (''FT'': 97).<br />
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Žižek also now rejects “[[democracy]]” (by which he means [[Liberal-democracy|liberal]], [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] democracy) as the status quo alternative to the communist hypothesis. There is a tension in bourgeois democracy: it is exceptional in its capacity to make the values of freedom and equality the very conditions of possibility for exploitation and domination: “The legal-ideological matrix of freedom-equality is not a mere ‘mask’ concealing exploitation-domination, but the very form in which the latter is exercised” (''FT'': 125). For Žižek, “Democracy – in the way this term is used today – concerns, above all, formal legalism: its minimal definition is unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which guarantee that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game” (''LC'': 264). The way to address democracy is to ask how it relates “to the dimension of [[universality]] embodied in [[the excluded]]” (FT: 100). The ([[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]]) [[liberal-democratic]] approach to the excluded is to find new ways of including them in the existing system. The difference between democracy and communism has to do with the attempt to include the excluded (through formal, ideological-legal discourse, such as “multiculturalism”) into the existing order, rather than transforming society around the interests, primarily, of the excluded. Th t is, of re-organizing political space to fit the excluded. Th is is how we should differentiate between bourgeois democracy and the “[[dictatorship of the proletariat]]” (''FT'': 102): “The goal of [[Terror|revolutionary violence]] is not to take over state power, but to transform it, radically changing its functioning, its relationship to its base … therein resides the key component of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (FT: 130–31). In contrast to the old Marxist idea about the “withering away of the state”, Žižek argues for the necessity of the state. But the latter is not, for him, the form of the state found in the former [[Soviet Union]]: “Dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary oxymoron, not a state-form in which the proletariat are now the ruling class … we are dealing with the dictatorship of the proletariat only when the state itself is radically transformed, relying on new forms of popular participation” (''FT'': 131). <br />
[[Category:Marxist theory]]<br />
[[Category:Politics]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Cognitivism/Neuroscience&diff=43743Cognitivism/Neuroscience2019-04-15T01:07:49Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>Ever since the 1960s, an important body of thought has developed in reaction to the presumed behaviorism according to which intellectual activity is beyond the grasp of any form of scientific investigation. Cognitivism has marked a return to a scientific approach to mental activity that has materialized in the development of the cognitive sciences.<br />
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The term refers to those sciences that study systems for representing understanding and the processing of information. Included in the term are certain areas of speculative research (philosophy of mind), artificial intelligence, semantic, syntactic, and lexical models (linguistics), the study of human activities (psychology), and the neuronal basis of those activities (neuroscience). These disciplines do not fall entirely within the field of cognitive science (social psychology or the neurobiology of development, for example).<br />
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Cognitivism originally developed as an interdisciplinary activity. The work of Jean Piaget on genetic epistemology and the work of Edward Toman on cognitive mapping opened the way in psychology long before Miller, Galanter, and Pribram's seminal work, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960). The term "artificial intelligence" was coined during a seminar by Herbert Simon.<br />
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The application of the methods of cognitive science to the field of psychopathology is more recent (M. C. Hardy-Baylé, 1996) and is based on work in the philosophy of mind and a renewed interest in phenomenology as well as on expert systems in artificial intelligence (models of paranoid thought, Parry), and especially experimental research (anomalies in the processing of information during schizophrenic states or a slowing down of the decision-making process during depressive states).<br />
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The development of cognitivism did not fail to arouse suspicion and opposition on the part of psychoanalysts. Some of their reservations were based on a confusion with so-called cognitive therapies, which in reality have to do with the content of representations (judgment errors) and not the underlying mechanisms. They are based on the use of suggestion, which falls within the domain of behavioral therapy, which in turn draws on behaviorism. More serious reservations involve the fact that cognitivism, which is primarily concerned with understanding, has often neglected the role of affects and has not sufficiently taken into consideration the question of motivation or the role of the body.<br />
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For their part cognitive science specialists have contested the scientific value of psychoanalytic theories and, until recently, have had little interest in the area of pathology.<br />
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In fact it is easy to show that Sigmund Freud's early work clearly makes use of a cognitive approach (H. K. Pribram, M. Gill, 1968 ), as does chapter seven of the Interpretation of Dreams and a number of later texts. Gradually the emphasis on a dynamic and economic approach shifted the investigation to why rather than how. David Rapaport and, later, Georges Klein resumed the study of thought mechanisms to compare them with experimental results. Their premature deaths and the still strong influence of behaviorism on the psychology of the time explain the delay before psychoanalysts actually got around to confronting these issues directly (P. Holzman, G. Aronson, 1992, D. Widlöcher, 1993).<br />
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This confrontation appears to have shocked psychoanalysts, to the extent that they were accustomed to question these disciplines in isolation (psychology, linguistics, logic modeling) and not within an interdisciplinary framework. If psychoanalysis is to assume its place within this framework, the terms of its inclusion must be specified. It would be necessary to acknowledge that psychoanalysis is a unique form of communication and not a science. The knowledge gained from it concerns complex objects that other approaches must first break down into more simple objects.<br />
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Such an exchange can benefit the cognitive sciences by exposing them to an area of mental life that has not been explored by them. Psychoanalysis can benefit by escaping the intellectual isolation of their field. It is less obvious how psychoanalytic treatment, as the investigation of the unconscious, can benefit from a more analytic knowledge of the complex objects it engages.<br />
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DANIEL WIDLÖCHER<br />
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See also: Amnesia; Archetype (analytical psychology); Body; Non-verbal communication; Psychic causality; Psychogenesis/organogenesis.<br />
Bibliography<br />
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* Hardy-Baylé, Marie-Christine. (1996). Troubles de l'information et troubles mentaux. In Daniel Widlöcher (Ed.). Traité de psychopathologie (pp. 463-496). Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.<br />
* Holzman, Philip, and Aronson, Gerald, (1992). Psychoanalysis and its neighboring sciences: Paradigms and opportunities, Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, 40 (1), 63-88.<br />
* Miller, George A., Galanter, E., and Karl H. Pribram. (1960). Plans and the structure of behavior, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.<br />
* Pribram, Karl H., Gill, Merton M. (1976). Freud's "Project" reassessed. London: Hutchinson.<br />
* Widlöcher, Daniel. (1993a). Intentionnalité et psychopathologie, Revue internationale de psychopathologie, 10,193-224.<br />
* ——. (1993b). L'analyse cognitive du silence en psychanalyse. Quand les mots viennentà manquer, Revue internationale de psychopathologie, 12, 509-528.<br />
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<ref>54-7, 59-60 Conversations</ref><br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Slavoj Žižek’s engagements with life-scientific treatments of human mindedness should be understood, straightforwardly enough, as fundamentally motivated by his materialist commitments. Žižekian materialism can fairly be portrayed as involving a reactivation of the German idealist ambitions of the youthful Tübingen trio of Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel. Th is late-eighteenth-century philosophical agenda, carried forward by Schelling and Hegel over the course of their subsequent intellectual itineraries, aimed at a difficult systematic synthesis of the apparent opposites of natural substance à la Spinoza and the transcendental subject ''à la'' Kant and Fichte (an agenda sometimes subsumed under the banner of a “Spinozism of freedom”). Needless to say, in the more than two hundred years between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, countless philosophical, scientific, political, religious and other changes directly relevant to “The Earliest System-Programme of German Idealism” (a succinct 1796 manifesto authored by either Hölderlin or Hegel) have amassed. While carefully taking these historical changes into consideration, Žižek nevertheless seeks likewise to develop a robust account of autonomous subjectivity as immanent-yet-irreducible to asubjective being as conceived of within the constraints of a strictly materialist ontology. Of course, as is common knowledge, he favours Lacanian psychoanalytic theory as an indispensable post-Hegelian resource for this effort to revivify the legacy of [[German idealism]].<br />
<br />
However, the role of Marxism in relation to Žižek’s redeployment of the German idealists (Hegel especially) warrants a few remarks. Like Marx and Engels as well as the Lenin of the ''[[Philosophical Notebooks]]'' before him, Žižek labours to retrieve from Hegelian philosophy, viewed as the apex of [[German idealism]], its specifically materialist concepts and moments. That is to say, Žižek’s Hegel already espouses versions of historical and dialectical materialisms (albeit ''avant la lettre''). The Marxist tradition also is highly relevant apropos the topic of the empirical life sciences in relation to theoretical materialism. Although Žižek himself does not spend much time highlighting this, a good number of Marxists, starting with Marx and Engels themselves (who were galvanized by the 1859 publication of Darwin’s ''[[The Origin of Species]]''), grappled with the implications of biology and its branches for historical/dialectical materialism. Key examples of this include three books by Engels (''[[Dialectics of Nature]]'', 1883, ''[[Anti-Dühring]]'', 1887, and ''[[Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy]]'', 1888), Dietzgen’s ''[[The Nature of Human Brain-Work]]'' (1869), Lenin’s ''[[Materialism and Empirio-Criticism]]'' (1908) and Bukharin’s ''[[Philosophical Arabesques]]'' (1937). Brusquely dismissed by the young Lukács and subsequently eclipsed from consideration in most Western Marxist circles, these pioneering efforts to interface historical/dialectical materialism with the natural sciences find echoes in Žižek’s explorations of contemporary cognitive science and neurobiology (as well as echoes in the works of Stephen Jay Gould, to whom Žižek periodically appeals, and the Richards Levins and Lewontin).<br />
<br />
''[[The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters]]'' contains arguably Žižek’s first sustained examination of a natural science in its third and final chapter, “Quantum Physics with Lacan” (this is appropriate for a book on Schelling, whose science-inspired Naturphilosophie is one of the main orientations represented within German idealism). Quite recently, in the fourteenth and final chapter of ''[[Less Than Nothing|Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism]]'', Žižek revisits the terrain of [[quantum physics]] (incidentally, this hulking tome also contains an “Interlude” formulating an incisive critique of cognitivist Douglas Hofstadter’s 2007 book ''[[I Am a Strange Loop]]''). However, in so far as Žižek is interested in forging a neither reductive nor eliminative materialist theory of minded subjects, the physics of the extremely small is far from enough for his purposes. A turn to the biology of the mid-sized organisms that are human beings is necessary.<br />
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One of Žižek’s earliest ventures onto the territories covered by cognitive science is his 1998 essay “[[The Cartesian Subject versus the Cartesian Theater]]” (in ''[[Cogito and the Unconscious]]'', a multi-contributor volume he edited). Therein, he employs American Analytic philosopher of mind Daniel Dennett (specifically, Dennett’s 1991 book ''[[Consciousness Explained]]'', with its quasi-Humean, neuro-science-inspired assault on standard notions of self-hood or personal identity) as a foil enabling him to clarify further his rendition of subjectivity as a cogito-like void of kinetic negativity – more precisely, Lacan’s barred subject ($) and the Freudian–Lacanian [[death-drive]] as re-read through the lenses furnished by Kant and the post-Kantian idealists. Situating Dennett within a larger contemporary constellation of all those declaring the modern subject dead or deconstructed in different ways – anti-Cartesianism makes for very strange bedfellows, bringing together a wide variety of otherwise unrelated or even antagonistic orientations (as observed through a paraphrasing of the opening lines of ''[[The Communist Manifesto]]'' at the start of 1999’s ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]'') – Žižek strives to extract from Dennett’s stance resources for his own position as well as to pinpoint what a cognitive and evolutionist approach of this sort fails to appreciate in [[German idealist]] and Lacanian models of subjectivity, themselves interpreted as elaborations and extensions of the Cartesian model.<br />
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As he similarly underscores in his contributions to the 2000 book ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left]]'' (co-authored with [[Judith Butler]] and [[Ernesto Laclau]]), Žižek in 1998 claims that dissolutions of a stable self or “me” into a plurality of disparate bits and pieces, whether as Dennett’s “multiple drafts” depiction of consciousness or any other number of other fragmentations of the “I” as classically conceived, ironically bring the cogito-like modern subject into even sharper relief, rather than, as this subject’s critics intend, invalidate it. Th is claim about the self-subverting irony of these sorts of critiques is underpinned by Žižek’s thesis according to which Cartesian-style subjectivity is nothing other than the hollowed-out virtual space of an insubstantial, anonymous, faceless emptiness – not to be confused with the substantial, fleshed-out contents of familiar selfhood or recognizable personal identity – serving as a condition of possibility for the manifest comings and goings of the fragments of the disunifi ed “postmodern” person. Kant’s and Hegel’s dismantlings of the substance metaphysics of early-modern “rational psychology” and Lacan’s distinction between the ego (''moi'') and the subject (''sujet'') are pivotal precursors and points of reference for this Žižekian line of argumentation.<br />
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In the 2004 books ''[[Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences]]'' and ''[[Conversations with Žižek]]'' (with [[Glyn Daly]]) Žižek deepens his engagements with cognitive science and neurobiology. Through references to life-scientifi c thinkers such as [[Richard Dawkins]], [[Lynn Margulis]], [[Humberto Maturana]], [[Stephen Pinker]] and [[Francisco Varela]], he outlines a number of speculative trajectories stemming from his approach to things biological via the triad of [[German idealism]], Marxism and psychoanalysis: the emergence of the cogito-like subject from the substances and processes described by biology and evolutionary theory; the implications for images and ideas of nature of this precise sort of Hegelian-dialectical emergentism; the immanent genesis of dis/mal-adapted humanity out of evolutionary pressures; the compatibility of German idealist, Marxist and psychoanalytic perspectives on language with meme theory; and the agreements and disagreements between a Lacanian theory of the libidinal economy and more naturalist renditions of the motivational forces and factors moving humanity. These musings set the stage for Žižek’s most significant treatment of biological topics in his 2006 book ''[[The Parallax View]]''.<br />
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Therein, Žižek wrestles directly with the neurosciences through readings of [[Antonio Damasio]] and [[Joseph LeDoux]] in particular, in addition to addressing once again a number of Analytic philosophers, cognitive scientists and evolutionary theorists addressed by him in previous texts (some of whom are mentioned above). Damasio’s and LeDoux’s research in “affective neuroscience” is critically evaluated on the basis of Lacan’s metapsychology of affect. But the figure of contemporary philosopher [[Catherine Malabou]], a former student of [[Jacques Derrida|Derrida]] and author of a Žižek-beloved study of Hegel (''[[The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic]]'', 2004), is by far the most important new reference along these lines featuring in ''[[The Parallax View]]''. In ''[[What Should We Do with Our Brain?]]'' (2008) and other texts, Malabou utilizes the empirical fact of [[neuroplasticity]] to initiate a comprehensive philosophical reassessment of biological analyses of humans in the vein of [[dialectical materialism]]. Although Žižek, in the fourth chapter of 2010’s ''[[Living in the End Times]]'', subsequently voices reservations about Malabou’s more recent book ''[[The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage]]'' (2012) – he faults her for misunderstanding [[the cogito]] as a pure void surviving even the most psychically devastating traumas impacting the self as well as for failing to grasp the true nature of Lacanian [[jouissance]] proper – her Hegel-inspired and science-informed materialist recastings of subjectivity remain extremely close to Žižek’s heart.<br />
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What Žižek and Malabou share in common is a determination fully to take into consideration the undeniable relevance of the natural sciences for a materialist theory of the subject without, for all that, giving up on the irreducibly nonnatural dimensions of subjectivity as uncovered within the past two centuries of European philosophy as well as Freudian psychoanalysis. This requires a series of very delicate balancing acts. But a categorically anti-naturalist materialism is no materialism whatsoever. <br />
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==References==<br />
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==See Also==<br />
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[[Category:Science]]<br />
[[Category:Slavoj Žižek]]<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Class/Antagonism&diff=43742Class/Antagonism2019-04-15T01:07:27Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
Given the slash sign that separates class and antagonism, this entry can be approached in three ways that correspond to three theoretical moments in Slavoj Žižek’s discourse. First, there is the post-Marxist moment of “antagonism”qua the Real whereby Žižek affirms the thesis of the impossibility of society as such, as irreconcilable with class antagonism, and yet gives this impossibility a thoroughly psychoanalytical inflection by explaining how enjoyment (''[[jouissance]]'') is organized around it. Second, there is the post-Marxist moment of “class antagonism”, which refers to the impossibility of achieving a harmonious social organization of class relations through a translation of Lacan’s well-known formulae regarding [[Sexual relationship|the non-existence of sexual relationship]]. And, finally, there is the Marxist moment of “class” as a particular content, which, through its fundamental exclusion, [[Overdetermination|overdetermines]] and grounds a certain historical horizon.<br />
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The first moment that refers to Žižek’s development of the notion of antagonism qua the Real can be traced, in part, to his earlier conversations with the post-Marxist discourse of [[Ernesto Laclau]] and [[Chantal Mouffe]] (“''[[Beyond Discourse Analysis]]''”: 249–60). Žižek seems to be broadly in agreement with Laclau and Mouffe resignifying the concept of antagonism as “the limit of all objectivity” by distinguishing it from the Marxist notion of contradiction – which Laclau and Mouffe argue harbours an essentialist [[ontology]] as it subordinates the effects of all social antagonisms to the mediating determination of class antagonism. At the same time, Žižek offers a favourable critique by pushing the framework of Laclau and Mouffe towards a psychoanalytically precise definition of this limit as the Real: “The traumatic kernel the symbolization of which always fails” (“''[[Beyond Discourse Analysis]]''”: 251). Signification produces a cut, a remainder, a surplus that, acting as the anchorage point of enjoyment, permanently disrupts from within the operation of imaginary and symbolic identifications, and therefore is responsible for why (a transparent organization of) society does not exist.<br />
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Žižek’s crucial point is that, in so far as discourse theory is unable to give an account of ''[[jouissance]]'' and remains merely at the level of deconstructing meaning, it runs the risk of moderating and curtailing the radical implications of antagonism as the Real of the social. It also misses the constitutive role of [[fantasy]] in patching up the fundamental antagonism of society by providing a particular “solution” to the organization of ''[[jouissance]]'' in the figure of an external cause that brings social harmony into ruin. For instance, in the supreme fantasy of [[Anti-Semitism|anti-semitism]], it is the corrosive identity of the Jew, associated with the finance/merchant capital that exploits the “‘productive’ classes”, that functions as this external obstacle. Žižek introduces “class” as an adjective that modifies antagonism precisely at this stage, when he reads “the Jew” as a fantasmatic figure that displaces the “source of … class antagonism” away from “the basic relation between the working and ruling classes” to the relation between a corporatist, productive social body and the corrosive financier/merchant (the Jew) who exploits this social body (''SO'': 125–26).<br />
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Nonetheless, the notion of class antagonism as a [[binary opposition]] that informs this pivotal example still falls short of capturing the psychoanalytical notion of “antagonism” in its most radical meaning. If, rather than focusing on this example, we look at the principal tendency that runs through Žižek’s writings, we find that Žižek does not in fact locate the “source of class antagonism” in the particular antagonism “between the working and ruling classes”. On the contrary, he repeatedly argues against such a theorization since this would conflate the psychoanalytic concept of antagonism as the ineradicable obstacle that throws into disarray every identity with the notion of antagonism as the particular relation between oppositional identities. In the subject-position model of class antagonism between the [[Proletariat|proletarian]] and the capitalist, each identity is presented as what prevents the other from achieving its identity, that is, the capitalist is the obstacle, the external enemy preventing the proletarian from realizing their full human potential. Žižek, however, argues that one should “invert” the relationship between these two terms:<blockquote>It is not the external enemy who is preventing me from achieving identity with myself, but every identity is already in itself blocked, marked by an impossibility, and the external enemy is simply the small piece, the rest of reality upon which we “project” or “externalize” this intrinsic, immanent impossibility. (“''[[Beyond Discourse Analysis]]''”: 251–2)</blockquote>Žižek draws further conclusions regarding class antagonism when he translates [[Formulae of sexuation|the Lacanian formulae]] regarding the impossibility of sexual relationship into the context of class politics: “There is no class relationship” (''SO'': 126; LC: 295). He does not mean by this that there are no concrete class structures, but that any attempt by participants to institute a ‘‘normal’’ way of organizing class relations is bound to fail. Class antagonism does not refer to the particular antagonisms between the serf and the lord, [[Proletariat|the proletariat]] and the capitalist, the slave and the master. Rather, class antagonism is the very impossibility of achieving an ideal class structure that can ultimately fix class relations. Approached from the perspective of the Real of class antagonism, it is possible to view various concrete articulations of class positions as socially invented (symbolic and imaginary) identities that make up for the non-existence of proper class relations. Each concrete class structure, or a particular class antagonism, like the one Žižek mobilizes in the example mentioned above, between “the working and ruling classes”, is ‘‘already a ‘reactive’ or ‘defense’ formation, an attempt to ‘cope with’ (to come to terms with, to pacify …) the trauma of class antagonism” (“Four Discourses”: 81). Nevertheless, these particular defence formations inevitably fail to stabilize the Real of class antagonism. A key indication of this is that, whenever class antagonism is translated into the “opposition of classes qua positive, existing social groups”, such as [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] versus working class, or the top elite versus middle class, “a surplus, a third element that does not ‘fit’ this opposition” emerges, such as the ''[[lumpenproletariat]]'', or the immigrant workers (“The Real of Sexual Diff erence”: 74).<br />
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It is important to stress that “class antagonism” is not merely another venue (adding to the series of gender, racial, ethnic antagonisms and so on) for Žižek to restage his position on the deadlock of sexual relation. If “antagonism” qua the Real is Žižek’s re-interpretation of the [[post-Marxist]] attempt at undoing class essentialism, “class antagonism” is his psychoanalytical in(ter)vention enabling him to persist within, while radically transforming, the field of [[post-Marxism]]. This is to say that “class antagonism” is not simply Žižek’s psychoanalytical application of antagonism to the issue of class, but rather his provocation for rethinking Marxist class politics since it puts into question the myriad utopian preoccupations that have drawn their moral force from fantasies of class reconciliation.<br />
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Žižek especially takes issue with communist fantasies that represent capitalism as a self-revolutionizing movement that would bring about its own end and deliver a society of producers free of enjoyment (i.e. aggression, envy and resentment) (“Multitude, Surplus, and Envy”). He supports his critique by drawing from Lacan’s homology between [[Jouissance|surplus jouissance]] and [[surplus value]]. [[Jouissance]] is not an assimilable excess that can be done away with in order to render signification whole again. [[Surplus value]] is not an assimilable excess that can be rid of so as to assist the passage from [[capitalism]] to communim. This homology opens up a space to pose a series of crucial questions for class politics, such as how to relate to or enjoy the irreducibility of class antagonism, and what would it mean to [[traverse the fantasy]] of class reconciliation. At the same time, the homology, in so far as it collapses the different roles the concepts of surplus value and [[Jouissance|surplus jouissance]] play within their respective problematics of Marxist political economy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, also raises some intractable questions for Žižek: if [[surplus value]], just like [[Jouissance|surplus jouissance]], is ineradicable, then does that mean capitalism is here to stay as the only possible defence formation for organizing “class antagonism”?<br />
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Our third and final moment refers to the particular way Žižek mobilizes the idea of “class” as a specific repressed content, describing it sometimes as foreclosed and sometimes as disavowed. This idea appears especially in his conjunctural formulations on the [[overdetermination]] of the social by class antagonism. In such formulations, the complex interweaving of different theoretical investments (which have their diverse sources in a combination of the [[Louis Althusser|Althusserian]] concept of structural causality, the Hegelian concept of oppositional determination and the Lacanian concept of foreclosure, as well as possibly others) suggests at times a diversion from the notion of class antagonism qua the Real and results in some confusion and possible tension in Žižek’s work.<br />
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These are the times when, for instance, Žižek treats class antagonism as a specifically privileged entity that, while “certainly appearing as one in a series of social antagonisms”, simultaneously “predominates over the rest, whose relations thus assign rank and influence to the others. It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity” (''CHU'': 320). In such contexts, in which class antagonism is characterized as “one touchy nodal point” that stands apart from other antagonisms in its constitutive force to “secretly [[Overdetermination|overdetermine]]” the social horizon that it is also a part of, the accent moves away from “antagonism” qua the Real towards a more traditional notion of “class” as deep structure. Here, class, through its exclusion, provides a condition of possibility for what Žižek designates as postmodern radical democractic politics (''CHU'': 96, 108). Th is renders Žižek vulnerable to accusations of positing a new version of the Marxist base-superstructure model; nevertheless, Žižek’s writings on class and antagonism should be read as a symptom of his complex relationship both to the contemporary Lacanian Left and the Marxist tradition.<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Capitalism&diff=43741Capitalism2019-04-15T01:07:06Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>Capitalism, when viewed as a system of exchange relations, is described as a commodity or market society in which everything, including one's labor power, has a price and all transactions are fundamentally exchange transactions. Capitalism, when viewed as a system of power relations, is described as a society in which every kind of transactional relation is fundamentally exploitative. (Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, 1998, p. 96.)<br />
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Capitalism is, was and always will be essentially and fundamentally a patriarchy. Iris Young wrote: "My thesis is that marginalization of women and thereby our functioning as a secondary labor force is an essential and fundamental characteristic of capitalism." (Tong, Rosemarie. Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, 1998, p. 122-123.)<br />
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Capitalism is a system that depends on the exploitation of underclass groups for its survival. (hooks, bell. Feminist Theory: from margin to center, 1984, p. 101.)<br />
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Capitalism is an ideology that has for its dominant values, "individualism, competitiveness, domination and in our time, consumption of a particular kind." (Hartman, Heidi, "The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism." from The Second Wave edited by Linda Nicholson, 1997, p. 99.)<br />
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"The first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and a soil." (Rosa Luxemburg 1963).<br />
"An advanced stage of patriarchy." (Azizah Al-Hibri 1981). (Both these quotes are from Chris Kramarae & Paula A. Treichler. Amazons, Bluestockings, and Crones, Pandora Press, 1992, p. 85.)<br />
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Capitalism: The economic system in which the means of production are in private ownership. Marx described the exploitative forms of capitalism in his theory of the capitalist mode of production. Radical feminists, liberals and socialist feminists agree that there can be no understanding of the nature of contemporary capitalist society without placing the oppression of women at the centre of such an analysis. Nor can any adequate feminist theory simply add women as a "missing ingredient" to an overall Marxist theory. (Humm, Maggie. The Dictionary of Feminist Theory, 1990, p. 23.)<br />
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Capitalism: An economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods and by prices, production and distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market. (The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 1997, p. 122.) <br />
14-16, 146-52, 154-6<br />
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== In the work of Slavoj Žižek ==<br />
If much of Žižek’s philosophical endeavour entails unveiling and intertwining the enigmas of Hegel and Lacan, it has become increasingly apparent that the political goal of this undertaking is the critique of global capitalism. In producing a Lacanian-Hegelian reading of Marxism, Žižek does not directly engage with normative critiques of our mode of material reproduction, nor seek to gain an empirical understanding of capitalism. Instead, his critical reading of the dialectics of ideology and enjoyment, [[class struggle]] and the structural reproduction of capital, seeks to provoke a disruptive rethinking of the methods through which capitalism continues to flourish and the opportunities to halt its seemingly infinite reproduction.<br />
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Although the critique of capitalism has become the primary focus of Žižek’s political enquiry, its prominence is most evident in his later texts. Capital had certainly been a point of discussion in Žižek’s initial work, but largely as a necessary exemplar for interventions into Marxism (''SO'': 23–6, 51–3). A more detailed analysis of the status of capital emerged through the debate with Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau in ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'' and in ''[[The Parallax View]]'', but it was only with the publication of ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'' that global capitalism became a distinct focus of Žižek’s political critique, a focus that has continued in ''[[Living in the End Times]]'' and ''[[Less Than Nothing]]'', in addition to his shorter works. There are three core elements to this critique: the symbolic logic of the self-revolutionary reproduction of capital, the co-option of desire and enjoyment, and the Real contradictions of [[class struggle]].<br />
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=== Symbolic limitations ===<br />
For Žižek, capital is not an object like any other. Instead, the operation of capitalism is the (absent) background against which all sociality responds, producing a “Real” limit to the possibilities for political action. Th is point has been the source of significant criticism, with suggestions that by constructing capitalism in such a manner, Žižek reduces politics to an impossible radicality (Laclau in ''CHU''; Sharpe 2004; Sharpe & Boucher 2010). For Žižek, however, this radicality (often referenced to the [[The Act|Lacanian Act]]) is a necessary response to a situation in which “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the ‘real’ that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global ecological catastrophe” (''MI'': 1).<br />
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Žižek’s development of capital as the Real been concurrent with his growing reflection on the seemingly endless reproduction of capitalism. The first links between capital and the Real emerged as seemingly secondary references in ''[[Mapping Ideology]]'' and ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', when (with reference to global climate change) Žižek suggested: “This catastrophe thus gives body to the Real of our time: the thrust of Capital which ruthlessly disregards and destroys particular life-worlds, threatening the very survival of humanity” (''TS'': 4). Moving on to argue that “Capital itself is the Real of our time” (''TS'': 276), in his three-way collaboration with Butler and Laclau, ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', he positions capital as the background against which all symbolizations must relate, a “limit to resignification” (''CHU'': 223) that “structures in advance the very terrain on which the multitudes of particular elements fight for hegemony” (''CHU'': 320).<br />
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Žižek however, makes a clear distinction between the economy/capital as an essential limit to signification and hegemonic struggle and capital as the positive condition that creates a symbolic background against which hegemonic struggle occurs (''CHU'': 319). This understanding is extended through the distinction Žižek makes between triadic modalities of the Real, giving the Real Imaginary, Symbolic and Real dimensions (''TK'': xii). Here the symbolic Real, which Žižek describes as “the Real as consistency”, provides the systematic background against which shared social life operates.<br />
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Consequently, the reproduction of the circuit of capital can be understood as independent of any of the demands of “reality”. Th is conception is not strictly ahistorical, but represents the rise in a self-fulfilling and self-revolutionizing finance capital such that:<blockquote>It [financial speculation] is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of material social processes themselves: the fate of whole swathes of the population and sometimes whole countries can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability with blessed indifference to how its movements will affect social reality. Therein lies the fundamental systematic violence of capitalism … it is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective”, systematic, anonymous. (''LN'': 244)</blockquote>The reproduction of systematic violence within capital takes the form of the [[Drive|Lacanian drive]], in the sense that the circulation and expansion of capital becomes an end in itself (''PV'': 60–61). Further, Žižek argues that capitalism has become a self-revolutionary force that is propelled by its own point of impossibility, whereby what appear to be obstacles to the circuit of capital become opportunities for profit (''LN'': 651). Indeed, for Žižek it is this very point of impossibility that drives capital, a point he argues Marx overlooks (''SO'': 50–53), along with the importance of the Lacanian notions of enjoyment and the superego (''FA'': 23).<br />
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=== Enjoying capitalism ===<br />
Beyond the “structural violence” of the symbolic Real, Žižek argues that capitalism maintains a “grip” upon subjectivity through the incitement of enjoyment, which under late capitalism is not prohibited but rather demanded. These demands upon the body are a form of [[superego]] enjoyment, which Žižek suggests has become the prevalent form of contemporary enjoyment under late capitalism.<br />
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This Lacanian [[superego]] is not the superego of the Freudian moral conscience but, instead, an excessive demand to enjoy. Utilizing this notion, Žižek argues that under capitalism enjoyment is no longer prohibited by moral norms, but explicitly demanded and administered, largely through the consumption of commodities that act as the embodiment of ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet a]]'', offering the prospect of full enjoyment (''FA'': 23; Stavrakakis 2000). In this way, even the most radical desire can be included, so long as it can become a site of profitability.<br />
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Consumerist fantasies, accompanied by the ideological fantasy of liberal democracy, present capitalism as a realm of freedom. Conversely, Žižek argues that this freedom functions only as “activity” – as opposed to the proper [[The Act|Lacanian Act]]– that presents the illusion of choice while maintaining the systematic reproduction of capitalism (''TS'': 374). Consequently, it is only with the radicality of the [[The Act|Lacanian Act]] that the possibility for rupture exists. Th is possibility of these radical acts is dependent upon the disruptive presence of the Real within capitalism.<br />
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=== Real fault lines ===<br />
Although much of Žižek’s work is directed at alerting the reader to the grip of capital and its lack of interest in the exigencies of ordinary life, he also seeks to point to fault lines within capitalism itself. These fault lines, particularly the “impossibility” of class struggle and the production of “new forms of apartheid”, threaten to disrupt the operation of capital.<br />
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As with his writings on capital and Marxism, Žižek’s development of class begins at a relatively late stage in his work, but is both vital to his understanding of capitalism and has distinct similarities to his reading of capital qua the Real. Žižek first addressed [[class struggle]] in ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', where he declares (with reference to the Real):<blockquote>In this way we might reread even the classic notion of “[[class struggle]]”: it is not the last signifier giving meaning to all social phenomena (“all social processes are in the final analysis expressions of the [[class struggle]]”), but – quite the contrary – a certain limit, a pure negativity, a traumatic limit which prevents totalization of the social-ideological field. (''SO'': 164)</blockquote>Žižek subsequently develops this reading to suggest that, although class acts as the totalizing moment in society, it does not operate as the classical Marxist positive guarantee for social life. That is, class (like capital) is not the anchoring point against which all other social positions can be determined, but instead acts as the totalizing antagonism that prevents the final occurrence of society (''I'': 100). Consequently, if capital operates as a systematic form of violence, the foundational wound that disrupts this systematic reproduction is [[class struggle]].<br />
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As a corollary, Žižek argues that the indeterminacy of class struggle ensures that the economy is always the political economy (''PV'': 55). Here, much as Lacan identified [[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]] as the [[antagonism]] by which both sexuality and sociality are riven, Žižek suggests that class plays this role in the economy (''UE'': 82). Thus, capitalism cannot simply be understood in terms of the [[symbolic Real]], but this logic is itself a response to the impossibility of [[class struggle]].<br />
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Nonetheless, because class struggle ''qua'' the Real is both the antagonistic point to which direct access is not available and the factor preventing this access, Žižek argues that it cannot be the subject of “positive research” (''ibid.''), and he has little more to say about it beyond reference to the Real, much to the consternation of his critics (Özselçuk & Madra 2005, 2007; Devenney 2007). Conversely, his later works have been driven towards the identification of those elements of capitalism that are proving most disruptive to it.<br />
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These works have increasingly focused upon a particular point of contradiction within capitalism, that of the slum dwellers of the developing world, which Žižek argues is one of the “new forms of apartheid” and the “crucial geo-political event of our time” (''LC'': 424). Here, contrary to his apparent understanding of capitalism as a monstrous juggernaut, Žižek argues that four points of antagonism currently threaten capitalism: the possibility of ecological collapse; the contradictions between immaterial labour, intellectual property and private property; the development of new scientific technologies that are changing the nature of life in its barest form; and the new forms of political exclusion (''LC'': 420–25). In this construction, it is the last element that defines the rest by adding that dimension of universality Žižek finds so decisive: the other three contradictions have been able to be included within the limits of capitalism; it is only the “part of no part” of the excluded human surplus that adds the “subversive” (''LC'': 430) edge to those other antagonisms that will be the “germs of the future” (''LC'': 426).<br />
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It is this Real dimension of universality, Žižek argues, that holds the possibility of disrupting the symbolic and imaginary reproduction of capitalism (''LN'': 1001–1004). Here, for Žižek, it is the traumatic possibilities hidden within our understanding of capitalism that open up the possibility of rupture, and it is the evocation of these possibilities that drives his description of capitalism.<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Judith_Butler&diff=43740Judith Butler2019-04-15T01:06:45Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>'''Judith Butler''' (b. February 24 1956) is a prominent post-structuralist philosopher and has made major contributions to feminism, queer theory, political philosophy and ethics. She is Maxine Eliot professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She also has a professorial appointment at the European Graduate School.<br />
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==In the work of Slavoj Žižek==<br />
Judith Butler is an American philosopher and political theorist well known for her early role in shaping the field of queer theory and for defining the anti-identitarian turn in feminist thought. Butler and Žižek’s intellectual conversation spans nearly two decades, and includes their collaboration with Ernesto Laclau on ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left]]''. Butler teaches rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley.<br />
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Butler’s ''[[Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity]]'' (1990) is frequently cited as one of the most influential books of the 1990s. There she proposed the theory of performativity to intervene in the ongoing feminist debate over whether sexual and gender identities are either biologically or symbolically given. Instead, Butler posits the notion that sex and gender are performative – that is, the effect of the repeated citation of a set of symbolic norms. Drawing on Foucault’s assertion that power produces its own resistances, Butler stresses the subversive potential of those performances that exceed their disciplinary production, including parodic and non-normative gender and sexual acts such as drag and lesbian sex. For her, political revolt inheres in attaining social recognition for this proliferation of subjectivities that always exceed the symbolic law of which they are the by-product.<br />
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It is on the question of the failure of the symbolic law fully to define the subject’s identity that Butler and Žižek have entered into a collegial debate, evidence of which has appeared in chapters of Butler’s follow-up to ''[[Gender Trouble]]'', ''[[Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”]]'' (1993), and Žižek’s ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology]]'' (1999), and their collaborative ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]''. The debate centres upon how each understands “the negativity at the heart of identity” and the relationship of this negativity, or gap, to hegemony and political contestation (''CHU'': 2). While Butler and Žižek both draw on psychoanalytic conceptions of the subject as rendered incomplete by an internal limit, where their antagonism ultimately lies is in the meaning of this inherent limit, defined by Žižek as the Lacanian Real. Th is difference underlies the specific disagreements the two have engaged in over the status of the subject’s attachment to symbolic norms, sexual difference and political action.<br />
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Butler accounts for the radical contingency of history through recourse to the Freudian unconscious and a model of the gendered and sexualized subject who, like the Foucauldian subject, is produced under the pressure of restrictive social norms, but, like the Hegelian subject, is profoundly attached to their subjection. She suggests that the Oedipal threat of castration produces a sexualized subject whose identities and desires can never live up to the ideals set out by their culture, and who therefore assumes their sexed position always as an iterative failure, but who is nevertheless attached to that failure. Butler reduces the symbolic law to a series of “performative speech acts” or “hegemonic norms”, which are subject to subversive re-inscription (Butler 1993: 106). For Butler, then, the possibility for political intervention lies neither in the Real nor in the Symbolic, but in the Imaginary – wherein periodic performative iterations of symbolic norms have the effect of displacing these norms themselves.<br />
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In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek attacks Butler on precisely this point, claiming that Butler is “simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic” (TS: 264). She is too optimistic because she posits that performative practices have the power to displace oppressive socio-symbolic norms, without seeing that each iteration, parodic or not, remains within the field defined by [[the big Other]]. And she is too pessimistic because, by limiting her critique to this fild, she fails to see the possibility of the overhaul of the whole system through the unpicking of the quilting point effected by [[The Act|the ethical act]] (''ibid.''). Žižek critiques Butler’s imaginarization of the Real and the Symbolic because it presents a subject who is always already trapped – free only in so far as they maintain some ironic distance from their own passionate attachment to subjection.<br />
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To this impasse, Žižek counters with the Lacanian Real. Žižek has consistently argued, following Lacan, that it is only by understanding the symbolic law to be rendered incomplete by an internally constitutive limit – the Real – that we can understand that law as ultimately contingent and subject to historical transformation. He argues not that the law excludes some set of acts or identities, but that the constitutive exclusion of the law is its own impossibility or gap. Žižek uses the logic of the Real to critique Butler’s understanding of the subject’s unconscious attachments to subjection. In ''[[The Psychic Life of Power]]'' (1997), Butler posits the unconscious as the site of “passionate attachments” to the very laws that pathologize desire and restrict its forms. To this model of the unconscious, Žižek opposes Lacan’s assertion that “[[the fundamental fantasy]] (the stuff ‘primordial attachments’ are made of) is already a filler, a formation which covers up a certain gap/void” (''TS'': 265). In other words, the Real of the subject’s desire is not constituted by a passionate attachment to some set of repressed or foreclosed desires prohibited by the symbolic law, but is constituted by a [[fantasy]] that covers over the impossibility at the heart of all desires.<br />
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This differential understanding of the subject also grounds Butler’s disagreement with Žižek over sexual difference. In ''[[Bodies that Matter]]'', Butler critiques Žižek for suggesting that the Real is produced through the foreclosure induced by the threat of castration on the basis that “Žižek’s theory thus evacuates the ‘contingency’ of its contingency” because it relies upon a fixed notion of castration that is always already gendered by the [[Oedipus complex]] (Butler 1993: 196). She goes on to suggest that what is lacking in Žižek’s formulation of the traumatic kernel of the Real is the very social and historical specificity of each one of his examples of trauma (including the family, the camps and the Gulag) (ibid.: 202). Put simply, Butler’s real problem with the Real is that it is a concept that she believes evades history and thus political appropriation. As she writes: “The problem here is that there is no way within this framework to politicize the relation between language and the real” (ibid.: 207). As a feminist philosopher and political theorist, Butler is invested in the field of the political, and because of this choice to align herself with history, she refuses, by definition, to accept a concept that she understands to be outside of history. By applying the same logic, Butler takes on Lacan’s assertion that “[[the Woman does not exist]]”, arguing that positioning the Woman as the always already “lost referent” is to preclude the possibility of her resignification (ibid.: 218).<br />
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In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek responds by reiterating his point that sexual difference and symbolic castration and the “[[Woman]]” have no positive existence, but are the traumatic residues of the failure of the Symbolic fully to capture or define us. As he puts it in ''[[Contingency, Hegemony, Universality]]'', “Every translation of sexual difference into a set of symbolic opposition(s) is doomed to fail, and it is this very ‘impossibility’ that opens up the terrain of the hegemonic struggle for what ‘[[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]’ will mean” (''CHU'': 111). The fact that sexual difference is Real means that all signifiers of sexual identity are precisely not transhistorical norms, but are fully historically and culturally specific and may therefore be subject to reconfiguration.<br />
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Žižek posits that Laclau’s concept of hegemony as constituted by an inherent antagonism bridges the gap between Butler’s insistence on the historical production of the sexed subject and his own neo-Lacanian notion of the subject rendered incomplete by the Real (''ibid.''). In this conception, hegemony is the unavoidable consequence of the splitting of the subject by language and subsequent structuring of the symbolic universe by a [[master-signifier]] given by culture. The radical absence that Lacan posits as the universal core of subjectivity (the Real) is the condition both for the necessary functioning of the [[master-signifier]] to quilt the subject’s desires to the social will and the ultimate contingency of this quilting. In other words, the apparent necessity of our cultural forms of sexuality is rendered contingent on the basis that it is [[the phallic signifier]] that serves to quilt the subject’s desire to the social link. It follows from this, as Laclau asserts, that the hegemony of the [[master-signifier]] “defines the very terrain in which a political relation is actually constituted” (''CHU'': 44).<br />
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For Žižek, then, the Real constitutes the internal limit of the political field itself, rendering power and our attachments to power always incomplete and subject to re-inscription. Butler’s feminist politics engage in what Laclau stresses as the “hegemonic struggle” over the social meaning of the Real of [[Sexual Difference|sexual difference]]. It is no surprise, then, that Butler ultimately refuses Lacanian theory because of her political insistence that the “Real” of sexual difference must be understood as always subject to history so that both universality and difference might be considered the effects of hegemony. By the same token, Žižek remains immune to Butler’s accusations of the heteronormative foundations of Lacan’s account of sexual difference because he can evacuate all social forms of their historical specificity by recourse to the Real as internal limit or excess. <br />
[[Category:People|Butler, Judith]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Butler, Judith]]<br />
[[Category:Tarrying with the Negative|Butler, Judith]]<br />
[[Category:Sexuality|Butler, Judith]]<br />
[[Category:People|Butler, Judith]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Bureaucracy&diff=43739Bureaucracy2019-04-15T01:06:17Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>==In the work of Slavoj Žižek==<br />
The term “bureaucracy” is defined straightforwardly enough by Žižek as “a depoliticized and competent administrative apparatus” (''LC'': 259). Simply citing this definition, however, belies the philosophical and political possibilities for Žižek’s notion of bureaucracy, especially in undercutting familiar notions of the term in history and literature. The idea of bureaucracy is most frequently engaged in Žižek’s writing with regard to Hegel’s defence of a monarchical head of state.<br />
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Ironically, in order for the state to function rationally, it requires the irrational leadership of a king. The monarch, in Žižek’s reading of Hegel, exists only for the purpose of authorizing and thus enacting the plans of the state bureaucracy. Th is relationship can be described in a number of ways. In the first, Žižek distinguishes between the “performative” role of the monarch and the “constative” role of the “business of the state bureaucracy” (''LC'': 134). The monarch and bureaucracy function symbiotically – the bureaucracy prepares constative plans, ideas and commands, which are only realized positively or negatively through the performative actions of the monarch (“I say it is true. Therefore it is true,” etc.). Another way of reading this relationship between monarch and bureaucracy is through the difference between the role of the bureaucracy as an objective function of the state that will best serve the interests of its citizens and the subjective role of the monarch, which exists to enact state business but has only subjective concerns. Finally, Žižek takes up Lacan’s terminology of the “chain of knowledge” or the functioning bureaucracy and the [[master-signifier]], here embodied in the monarch (''ibid.'').<br />
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These distinctions between monarch and bureaucracy have as much to do with their respective functions as with how they come to occupy their roles. Whereas bureaucrats are chosen for their roles by their qualifications, the monarch is “an authority not justified by its qualification … the king is justified by the very fact that he is king” (LN: 30). Indeed, to return to Lacanian discourse, “the monarch is the ‘pure’ signifier, the master-signifier ‘without signified’. His entire ‘reality’ (and authority) rests on the name, and that is why his ‘effectiveness in reality’ is arbitrary; it can be abandoned to the biological contingency of heredity” (''ITR'': 127–8). Žižek acknowledges that for Hegel “the master is an imposter” (''LN'': 430). The master is only the master because “he occupies a position of a master (that his subjects treat him as a master)” (''LN'': 430). Indeed, the entire functioning of the monarchy and the bureaucracy rests on the tautology “I obey the king because he is king” (''ITR'': 129). Žižek asks if Hegel is not “caught in an illusion of purity – namely of the purity of the expert-knowledge of the state bureaucracy which only works rationally for the common good” (''LN'': 424). However, it is precisely this “illusory wager”, where “if one isolates this moment of impurity (subjective caprice) in the figure of the monarch, this exception will make the rest (the body of the state bureaucracy) rational, exempted from the play of conflicting partial interests” (ibid.), that holds the true possibility for Hegel and makes the wager worth taking. The random, biological manner in which the king is chosen puts the king above and outside of the day-to-day manoeuvering of the bureaucracy.<br />
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Žižek notes that societies before the modern age relied on “a transcendent source which ‘verified’ the result, conferring authority on it (God, the king …)” (''LN'': 428). The problem under modernity is that “modern societies perceive themselves as autonomous, self-regulated; that is, they can no longer rely on an external (transcendent) source of authority” (''ibid.''). However, despite this perception, if our modern mechanisms were “fully mechanized and quantified, deprived of [their] ‘performative’ character”, the system would have no support (''ibid.'').<br />
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The bureaucracy must then occupy the position of [[master-signifier]] in the absence of a monarch. Žižek takes up one of Lacan’s examples of the power of the [[master-signifier]] as the minimal gap or delay in knowing the results of an exam. Even if a pupil provides perfect answers, it is not until those answers are confirmed by the teacher or another authority that the anxiety of testing is lifted. Žižek notes that it is the mystique of bureaucracy that also maintains this gap. He writes: “You know the facts, but you can never be quite sure of how these facts will be registered by bureaucracy” (''LC'': 22–3). The mystique of bureaucracy, or what Žižek describes as symbolic efficiency, “concerns the minimum of ‘reification’ on account of which it is not enough for us, all concerned individuals, to know some fact in order for it to be operative” (TS: 394). Symbolic efficiency or the symbolic institution, on the contrary, must know or “register” this fact if the performative consequences of stating it are to ensue.<br />
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Bureaucratic symbolic efficiency is capable of shaping perception and reality: “Symbolic efficiency thus concerns the point at which, when the Other of the symbolic institution confronts me with the choice of ‘whom do you believe, my word or your eyes?”, I choose the Other’s word without hesitation, dismissing the factual testimony of my eyes” (''TS'': 394–5). To illustrate this point of symbolic efficiency within bureaucracy, Žižek uses what he describes as the well-worn joke about a young man who believes he is a grain of corn. After working with a doctor for some time, the man is relieved to realize that he is a man, not a grain of corn. Upon leaving the doctor’s office, the man encounters a chicken and runs with fear back to the doctor. The doctor expresses surprise since the man no longer believes himself to be a grain of corn, to which the man replies: “I know that I am not a grain of corn, but has anyone told the chicken?” Žižek writes: “This story, nonsensical at the level of factual reality, where you are either a grain or not, is absolutely sensible if one replaces ‘a grain’ with some feature that determines my symbolic identity” (''TS'': 393). Žižek notes that within bureaucracy, for instance, one can be promoted and then encounter a lower-ranking member of the bureaucracy who does not recognize the authority of the new position because it has not entered into the symbolic register of bureaucratic functioning. “Isn’t this a bit like telling you: ‘Sorry, to us you’re still a grain of corn, not yet a human being’? In short there is a certain mysterious moment at which a measure or decree becomes operative, registered by the big Other of the symbolic institution” (''ibid.'').<br />
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Perhaps because of its potential to take on the role of [[master-signifier]] and its symbolic efficiency, Žižek is wary of bureaucracy and its possibility for overwhelming leaders. He advocates, thus, for a strong leader: “We should not be afraid to draw all the consequences from this insight, endorsing the lesson of Hegel’s justification of monarchy and ruthlessly slaughtering many liberal sacred cows on the way” (''LN'': 1001). Separating the roles of the bureaucracy and the monarchy produces a necessary distance between bureaucracy and the king. This distance is what protects against totalitarianism, which for Žižek is not a master who “imposes his unconstrained authority and ignores the suggestions of rational knowledge” (''LN'': 430). Rather, totalitarianism is “a regime in which knowledge (the rationally justified authority) immediately assumes ‘performative’ power” (''ibid.''). For Žižek, this is precisely the problem in perceptions of Stalinism: “Stalin was not (did not present himself as) a master, he was the highest servant of the people, legitimized by his knowledge and abilities” (''LN'': 1000). Indeed, according to Žižek, Stalinism did not actually suffer from an “excessive ‘cult of personality,’ but quite the opposite: [Stalin] was not enough of a Master but remained part of the bureaucratic-party Knowledge, the exemplary subject-supposed-to-know” (''ibid.''). Žižek also pushes back against the characterization of Stalinism as “Bureaucratic socialism” – the problem for Žižek is not that Stalinism was mired in bureaucracy as Stalin himself was wont to declare, but the contrary, that what “Stalinist regimes really lacked was precisely an efficient ‘bureaucracy’” – that is, to reiterate the definition of the term, “a depoliticized and competent administrative apparatus” that stood separate from Stalin (''LC'': 259).<br />
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For Žižek, Kafka’s novels are exemplary of the dangers of integrating ruler and bureaucracy. Žižek counters the usual claims about Kafka that the worlds of his novels are an irrational or exaggerated, a fantastic and subjectively distorted version of “modern bureaucracy and the fate of the individual within it”. On the contrary, he claims that these readings miss the fact that “this very ‘exaggeration’… articulates the fantasy regulating the libidinal functioning of the ‘effective, ‘real’ bureaucracy itself” (''SO'': 33). He clarifies this passage by stating that Kafka’s world is not a “fantasy image of social reality”; rather, it is an image of the “fantasy which is at work in the midst of social reality itself”. Th is fantasy works through a rather powerful “as if”: “We act as if we believe in the almightiness of bureaucracy, as if the President incarnates the Will of the People, as if the Party expresses the objective interest of the working class” (''SO'': 34).<br />
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Throughout Žižek’s writing, the idea of bureaucracy is closely linked to Hegelian considerations of monarchy. Bureaucracy also holds its own symbolic efficiency, however, and in contemporary society, in the absence of a monarch, can take the place of the [[master-signifier]]. The mystique of bureaucracy holds the power to shape both social reality itself and the functioning fantasies within it.<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Biopolitics&diff=43738Biopolitics2019-04-15T01:05:52Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>=In the work of Slavoj Žižek=<br />
It is important to consider how, for Žižek, we enter the domain of politics only by acknowledging that – to use Jacques Lacan’s well-known formula – “the big Other does not exist”. Th e space of politics, in other words, is grounded in a substantial gap whose ''political'' function is to disrupt, indeed tear apart, the illusory positivity of any social order. One does not understand Žižek’s politics if one misses the dialectical paradox at its heart, whereby politics itself is conceived as split between its ontic domain, constitutive of the social, and the ontological lack that sustains it. Crucial for Žižek’s leftist engagement is to hold on to this ''externality of politics to itself'', which he derives from both Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The structure of the Žižekian concept of politics is therefore that of a parallax: if from one angle it appears concerned with the conflicts and compromises that make up our social arena, a small perspectival shift reveals it as an abyssal gap undermining the very framework of the social. More specifically, a political event “emerges ''ex nihilo'' … it attaches itself precisely to the Void of every situation, to its inherent inconsistency and/or excess” (''TS'': 130). The ground suddenly opens up under our feet, and only then do we truly experience what politics is.<br />
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Ultimately, from Žižek’s Hegelo-Lacanian point of view, the space of the political is primarily the “zero-level of politics, a pre-political ‘transcendental’ condition of the possibility of politics, a gap which opens up the space for the political act to intervene in, a gap which is saturated by the political effort to impose a new order” (''LN'': 963). Th ere is no politics without the awareness that the political struggle takes place against the backdrop of its own self-relating negativity, which constitutes its pulsating heart. The substance of politics is a paradoxical “lack to itself”, the emptiness of the place where it erects its own meanings.<br />
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Only after grasping Žižek’s radical take on politics can we evaluate his critical understanding of biopolitics. In a sense, the task in hand involves answering a straightforward question: can biopolitics think (dialectically) the substantial void that qualifies Žižek’s notion of politics? Before tackling this question, let us say that Žižek agrees with Michel Foucault’s well-known definition of biopolitics as the modern exercise of power through the administration of human life, which marked a major historical shift from the sovereign’s absolute power over the life and death of his subordinates. Indeed, Žižek often labels biopolitics “post-politics” in order to describe the anodyne vacuity of today’s liberal-democratic consensus. What “post-political biopolitics” is responsible for is precisely the bypassing of the political. If this is Žižek’s basic stance, there are further twists in his discussion of biopolitics. Th e best way to summarize them involves making a distinction between two contemporary approaches to biopolitics. If with Foucault there remained a fundamental ambiguity with regard to its use, in contemporary philosophy we can distinguish between a negative and a positive application of the term. Negative biopolitics emphasizes the deleterious effects of biopower and is best represented by the figure of Giorgio Agamben. Positive biopolitics embraces the politically progressive potential of our biopolitical horizon and is championed by thinkers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. These different approaches embody, no doubt, two extreme poles in the complex universe of biopolitical thought. Yet, precisely as ''theoretical'' positions, they are the most representative of the entire field, and as such are often referred to by Žižek.<br />
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Considering that, as we have seen, Žižek’s thought is sustained by the conviction that negativity, in its dialectical role, retains ontological primacy over any affirmative order of being, it follows that positive biopolitics is looked at rather unsympathetically by him, to the extent that he rejects the theoretical and political edifice on which Hardt and Negri articulate their postmodern Marxist critique of capitalism by singing the praises of immaterial or cognitive labour as, supposedly, already delivered from capitalist exploitative dynamics. Žižek discards the argument that, in today’s capitalism, the hegemonic role of ''immaterial'' over material labour produces new forms of life, a biopolitical multitude of intellectual, affective and ultimately social relations that, in principle, already constitute the basis for the exercise of an “absolute democracy” beyond capital. He argues that by celebrating the disruptive potential of global capitalism, Hardt and Negri repeat the error made by Marx (and many of his followers), who believed that the productive spiral of capitalism needed only to be corrected via the elimination of profit for free and full productivity (communism) to be unleashed (this is Žižek’s well-rehearsed theme of “communism as a capitalist fantasy”; see ''OWB'': 19). Interestingly, to this biopolitical faith in the intrinsically liberating quality of cognitive labour (adapted from Marx’s much-celebrated “general intellect” fragment in the Grundrisse), Žižek opposes today’s figure of the unemployed as “pure proletarian”: “the substantial determination of an unemployed person remains that of a worker, but he or she is prevented from either actualizing or renouncing it, so he or she remains suspended in the potentiality of a worker who cannot work” (''RG'': 291).<br />
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What is striking about Žižek’s point is its unmistakable Agambenian flavour. Arguably, the biopolitical figure that is closer to Žižek’s theory is Agamben’s homo sacer – the individual stripped of their rights and reduced to “bare life” – in so far as it embodies Žižek’s central theme of “substanceless subjectivity” (or, what is the same thing, Lacan’s notion of the barred subject, emptied of all pathological content). The radicality of Agamben’s notion of ''[[homo sacer]]'', Žižek contends, needs to be defended from “liberal gentrifications”, since one should draw the conclusion that, ultimately, we are all ''homines sacri'' (DR: 100–102). In political terms, Žižek can only agree with Agamben that the law by definition implies exclusion: ''bìos'' (political life) produces ''zoé'' (bare life). This dialectic of exclusion is wholly subscribed to by Žižek. In fact, it is embedded in his understanding of the Hegelian dialectic understood as secreting, and hinging on, a “non-digestible” (excluded) remainder, as well as in the Lacanian dichotomy between the Symbolic and the Real.<br />
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More generally, Žižek endorses Agamben’s insight into the necessity of a disjunctive gesture rather than a synthetic one (''PV'': 299). In fact, whenever Agamben attempts to move beyond the primacy of the negative by embracing a Benjaminian-type messianism, Žižek raises questions. When Agamben adumbrates the possibility of untying the knot of Law and violence (or Law and exclusion) Žižek comments that this utopian messianic scenario has already been co-opted by capitalist ideology, in the form of either a globalized reflexivity unable to generate change, or explosions of psychotic violence at the level of everyday reality (''PV'': 303). More generally, and also in relation to Hardt and Negri’s politics, Žižek is critical of biopolitics’ attempts to posit the sustainability of the modality of “subtracted subjectivity” vis-à-vis the various forms of biopower. Žižek finds this belief in the autonomy of subtraction both politically naive and theoretically unsound. What biopolitical thought tends to miss is that the subtractive contraction from the One of Law and its exceptions cannot seamlessly engender a new singularized “we”, a new disalienated communitarian identity not sustained by a [[master-signifier]]. Žižek therefore holds on to the proper paradox of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which can be summarized as follows: although the big Other does not exist, it needs to be presupposed if there is to be a minimum of social interaction, of community. The attempts to think biopolitics beyond the gesture of negative contraction tend to ignore the necessity of alienation in the big Other. This scepticism prefigures Žižek’s deeper concern with biopolitics’ inability to place capitalist exploitation at the heart of its theoretical paradigm.<br />
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Despite his endorsement of Agamben’s focus on exclusion, Žižek is adamant that biopolitics as such, including Foucault’s and Agamben’s versions, remains unsatisfactory as a critical theory of society, for it misses the crucial Marxist accent on economic exploitation. He makes this point explicitly in ''[[Less Than Nothing]]'', when he states (quoting also from Fredric Jameson):<blockquote>The theories of Foucault and Agamben are insufficient: all their detailed elaborations of the regulatory power mechanisms of domination, all the wealth of notions such as the excluded, bare life, ''[[homo sacer]]'', etc., must be grounded in (or mediated by) the centrality of exploitation; without this reference to the economic, the fight against domination remains “an essentially moral and ethical one, which leads to punctual revolts and acts of resistance rather than to the transformation of the mode of production as such” – the positive program of such “ideologies of power” is generally one of some type of “direct” democracy. The outcome of the emphasis on domination is a democratic program, while the outcome of the emphasis on exploitation is a communist program … What this [biopolitical] notion of domination fails to register is that only in capitalism is exploitation naturalized, inscribed into the functioning of the economy. (PV: 1003–1004)</blockquote>Žižek therefore laments the politically insipid and defeatist attitude of biopolitical thought, inasmuch as it is concerned with the generic notion of “sovereign power” rather than “capitalist power”.<br />
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As anticipated, Žižek agrees with the basic coordinates of the biopolitical discourse and its critique of the logic of domination. Today’s ideological constellation, for him, is definitely biopolitical. We are told that the goal of our lives must be wellbeing, with as few shocks as possible, to the extent that we treat ourselves as objects of biopolitical regulation, as the affirmation of the new narcissistic subject bent on self-realization confirms. Crucially, however, Žižek claims that “this Janus-faced biopolitical logic of domination is itself only one of the two aspects of the University discourse as the hegemonic discourse of modernity”. If, as Žižek suggests, biopolitics coincides with what Lacan named the discourse of the University, namely “the direct rule of experts legitimized by their knowledge”, which undermines the [[discourse of the Master]], at the same time Lacan’s formula captures the rule of capital. One needs therefore to distinguish between the logic of domination exposed by biopolitics as “bureaucratic “totalitarianism”, as the rule of technology, of instrumental reason, of biopolitics, as the “administered world”, and the capitalist matrix characterized by the incessant production and re-appropriation of that excess called surplus value. These two aspects are “ultimately incompatible”, for our biopolitical horizon cannot encompass the capitalist matrix: “We should not succumb to the temptation of reducing capitalism to a mere form of appearance of the more fundamental ontological attitude of technological domination” (''PV'': 297–8). Th is caution is, indeed, the key to grasping Žižek’s critique of the limit of the biopolitical discourse.<br />
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From a purely political perspective, this limit can be described, Žižek tells us, as the inability to politicize the growing masses of excluded subjects as the locus of universality. Th is is a theme he often presents through the old Leninist topos of the “[[dictatorship of the proletariat]]” (where “proletariat” is used as a generic name for the “out-of-joint” class, which today is actually embodied by the [[Lumpenproletariat|''lumpenproletariat'']]) as the only way to break with the hegemony of the biopolitical (''LC'': 413–19), in so far as the latter coincides with the political horizon ''tout court'', whether as a critical or affirmative paradigm:<blockquote>Bio-politics includes the brutal forms of regimentation that exist in our world as well as the desire to prevent human suffering. The old leftist paradigms of the communist and social democratic welfare states are lost … A more radical emancipatory leftist way of thinking and acting needs to be reinvented. And this is what one should struggle for today. (Eikmeyer 2007)</blockquote>As we have seen, this stance is consistent with Žižek’s theory (derived both from Hegel and Lacan), in so far as it posits the “ontological primacy of the remainder” (substanceless subjectivity, self-relating negativity, etc.) ''qua'' empty place of the inscription of a given symbolic order of meaning.<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Alain_Badiou&diff=43737Alain Badiou2019-04-15T01:05:28Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>[[Alain Badiou]] (born 1937, Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent [[France|French]] [[left-wing]] [[philosopher]] formerly chair of [[Philosophy]] at the [[École Normale Supérieure]] (ENS).<br />
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==Biography==<br />
Badiou was trained formally as a [[philosopher]] as a student at the ENS from 1956 to 1961, a period during which he took courses at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]]. He had a lively and constant interest in mathematics. He was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the [[United Socialist Party (France)|United Socialist Party]] (PSU), an offshoot of the [[French Communist Party]]. The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the [[decolonization]] of [[Algeria]]. He wrote his first novel, [[Almagestes]], in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by [[Louis Althusser]] and grew increasingly influenced by [[Jacques Lacan]].<br />
<br />
The student uprisings of [[May 1968]] had a huge impact on Badiou. While 1968 politicized many [[intellectual]]s, it served to reinforce Badiou's commitment to the [[far left]], and he continued to organize [[communist]] and [[Maoist]] groups such as the UCFML. In 1969 he joined the faculty of [[University of Paris]] VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis), which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors [[Gilles Deleuze]] and [[Jean-François Lyotard]], whose [[leftist]] philosophy he considered an unhealthy deviation of more main-line [[Marxism]]. In 1988 he published what is now considered by many to be his major statement, ''L'être et l'événement''. He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the [[European Graduate School]] and the [[Collège International de Philosophie]]. He is now a member of "L'Organisation Politique" which he founded with some comrades from the Maoist UCFML in 1985.<br />
<br />
==Articles by Alain Badiou==<br />
<blockquote>''Main Page: [[Articles by Alain Badiou]]''</blockquote><br />
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==Resources==<br />
<blockquote>''Main Page: [[Resources for Alain Badiou]]''</blockquote><br />
<br />
=In the work of Slavoj Žižek=<br />
The French philosopher Alain Badiou has played a crucial role in Žižek’s work, particularly since 1999, when he devoted an entire chapter of ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'' to Badiou’s ''[[Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism]]'' (1997). In recent years, Žižek’s dialogue with Badiou has become increasingly active, culminating in ''[[The Parallax View]]'' and ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', both of which include detailed responses to Badiou’s ''[[Logics of Worlds]]'' (2006).<br />
<br />
Why is Badiou’s work so important to Žižek? Broadly, Badiou’s political and philosophical engagement as a revolutionary leftist has been a key influence on Žižek in his attempt to think a political project that constitutes an “alternative to global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multiculturalism” (''TS'': 4). Badiou, like Žižek, sees the discourse of multiculturalism as an impediment to authentic forms of resistance (Badiou 2001: 20). Like Žižek, too, he is a universalist, an “anti-anti-essentialist” who vindicates the possibility of a universal, immortal Truth (''PV'': 323). These points of contact, though, are conjugated with divergences: among other things, Žižek criticizes Badiou for his supposed Kantian idealism, his omission of Marxism from his otherwise communist perspective and even his philosophy’s lack of radical potential.<br />
<br />
How are these ambivalent relations played out in Žižek’s texts? In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek upholds Badiou’s politics of Truth and his “pathbreaking reading of St Paul” (''TS'': 3), while re-inscribing them into a Lacanian psychoanalytical framework. As Žižek points out, the core of Badiou’s philosophy is the opposition between Being and Event, which he theorizes in mathematical terms, using Cantorian set theory. Being, or Being-as-Being, is for Badiou an “irreducible multiplicity” (Badiou 1999: 104), a pure, inconsistent, unstructured multitude of elements. These existent elements form a “situation”, a positive ontological order accessible to Knowledge, a “consistent presented multiplicity” (''ibid''. 2005: 522), or what Žižek in Lacanian terms calls the symbolic order. When these elements are collected together under a shared term (like Victorian society, modern art or capitalism), they are, in Badiou’s terms, “counted as One” (''ibid''.: 24). From this count-as-One arises a representation of the presented multiplicity, a metastructure that Badiou terms the “state of the situation”, referring at once to the political state and the general status quo. Since “it is formally impossible … for everything which is included (every subset) to belong to the situation” (''ibid.'': 97), there is an excess of representation over presentation, of the state over the situation.<br />
<br />
This excess is reformulated in Žižek’s terms as the “symptom”, and exemplified by an economic crisis in the system of capitalism (''TS'': 131). It is this excess that opens the space for an Event, or in Žižek’s terms the “traumatic encounter with the Real”, the Lacanian ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' (''TS'': 141). The Event, which belongs to the domain of non-Being, suddenly renders visible what was repressed or made invisible by the state. In turn, the Truth is constituted through the active intervention of a subject, who chooses to be faithful to its potential for disrupting consensual knowledge and instituting a new order of Being. In Badiou’s Christian paradigm, Christ’s Resurrection is the Event that emerges from the foundational void of Being-as-Being, and St Paul is the subject of the Truth-Event.<br />
<br />
Although the Badiouian Truth relies upon a subjective intervention, this is not to say that it is personal or contingent. In Badiou’s own terms, “he who is a militant of truth identif[ies] himself … on the basis of the universal” (Badiou 2003: 109). Žižek insists on this point: although Truth is contingent in so far as it emerges from a concrete historical situation, “in every concrete and contingent situation there is ''one and only Truth''” (''TS'': 131). For Žižek, Badiou’s notion of a universal, infinite truth is a crucial retort to deconstructionism and to the advocates of anti-essentialist postmodernism. Badiou’s insight also allows Žižek to distinguish between historicism and “historicity proper”: whereas the former refers to a specific set of historical circumstances that lead to, and explain, the Event, the latter “involves the specific temporality of the Event and its aftermath, the span between the Event and its final End” (''TS'': 133) – between Christ’s death and the Last Judgement, between revolution and communism, and so forth.<br />
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It is the relation between Event and mortality that drives a wedge between Žižek and Badiou. Badiou’s theoretical edifice is built upon an anti-dialectical – and what Žižek criticizes as Kantian – opposition between two orders, Being and Event, and therefore finitude and immortality. His Event is radically separated from the death-drive, and linked instead with infinity, immortality and subjective constitution. Lacan’s [[The Act|act]], on the contrary, is inextricable from mortality, the death-drive and, to use Lacan’s own words, “destruction beyond putrefaction” (''SVII'': 268). Instead of an opposition between Being and Event, Lacan insists on an “in-between” space – the “between two deaths”, the monstrous state of ''[[lamella]]'' – that bridges this gap. The subject’s immortality, for Lacan and Žižek after him, can emerge only from human finitude. Badiou’s distance from Lacan on this point is the principal weakness of his philosophy according to Žižek: “What remains beyond Badiou’s reach is [the] ‘domain beyond the good’, in which a human being encounters the death-drive at the utmost limit of human experience, and pays the price by undergoing a radical ‘subjective destitution’, by being reduced to an excremental remainder” (''TS'': 161). For Žižek, the Lacanian subject’s “limit-experience” sets them apart from the Badiouian subject (''ibid''.). Since the death-drive is essential to any rupture from the symbolic order, the Lacanian act is a better basis for Badiou’s notions of a new political practice than his own Event.<br />
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In ''[[The Parallax View]]'', Žižek moves beyond negotiating between Lacan’s and Badiou’s theories and places himself in a more direct relationship with Badiou’s then-unpublished ''[[Logic of Worlds]]''. Žižek’s primary focus is on Badiou’s politics of prescription, mediated through Peter Hallward’s essay on that subject (Hallward 2005). As he explains, the Truth-Event is posited in Badiou’s theory as a point of departure from which new codes of action are directly put into place (PV: 322). The Badiouian Truth, in this sense, is treated as already realized. Its future power is anticipated by the subject’s fidelity in the present. Hence Badiou’s primary example of a subject of/to Truth is Paul, an apostle rather than a prophet: he announces that the Event has come, not that it is to come. Žižek finds this politics useful on a number of levels. First, it allows a clear distinction between radical emancipatory politics and the predominant status quo politics: whereas the former is an Event that at once stems from, and leads to, a universal Truth, the latter is a State, which according to Žižek is enforced and (im)mobilized by means of fear, whether of immigrants, crime or ecological catastrophes (''PV'': 323). Second, the possibility of a universal, immortal Truth serves him in his struggle against the humorously termed “gang of democracy-to-come deconstructionist-postsecular-Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects” (''PV'': 11). Žižek offers two examples of successful practitioners of prescriptive political acts: John Brown in the context of abolitionism in nineteenth-century America, and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the context of political equality of women in twenty-first-century Spain.<br />
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As in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', though, Žižek raises several points of contention. Expanding on his previous criticism of Badiou’s disavowed Kantianism, Žižek criticizes his continued insistence on the opposition between the Real and the subject, between existent Being and emergent Truth, and his consequent refusal of any Lacanian ontologization of the subject. On the one hand, Žižek agrees that the excess of the Unnameable – which he translates as the “''stupidity'' of the Real” (''PV'': 325) – should not be essentialized. On the other hand, he finds the maintenance of this unbridgeable gap problematic, since it jars with Badiou’s politics of prescription: since the Truth cannot be reinserted into the ontological domain of Being, Žižek argues, it remains to-come, it refuses actualization, it is a constantly deferred possibility in the future rather than a present actuality (''ibid''.). In other words, the notion of the Event is too idealistic, because the infinite immaterial order of the Truth-Event is privileged above the material, finite order of Being (PV: 166). His second problem with Badiou’s politics of prescription is that it is grounded in the concept of equality. According to Žižek, Badiou’s egalitarian political extremism (or what he terms “enforced ‘terrorist’ equality”) is “a phenomenon of ideologico-political ''displacement'': an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal actually to ‘go to the end’” (''PV'': 326). We thus return to his aforementioned suggestion that Badiou’s philosophy is not radical enough. Th is time, though, Žižek insists that Badiou’s lack of radicalism is due to his abandonment not of Lacan, but of Marx. Against Marx’s crucial insertion of political emancipation into the sphere of economics, Badiou refuses to regard the economy as a potential site for an Event. As Žižek points out, his four “generic procedures” – his four principal categories for Truth-processes, art, love, mathematics and politics – exclude economics.<br />
==External links==<br />
*[http://www.lacan.com/bibliographyb.htm Alain Badiou Bibliography]<br />
*[http://www.lacan.com/frameabad.htm Alain Badiou page at lacan dot com]<br />
*[http://www.egs.edu/faculty/badiou.html Badiou Faculty profile at the European Graduate School]<br />
*[http://www.ci-philo.asso.fr/default_fixe.asp Collège International de Philosophie]<br />
*[http://orgapoli.net/ Organisation politique]<br />
*[http://students.washington.edu/schenold/badiou/ Blooded by Thought - Bibliography, Resource (updated 04.01.2006)]<br />
<br />
==References==<br />
<references /><br />
48, 106, 107, 108, 128-9, 135-6, 137, 144-5, 158<br />
<br />
TICKLISH<br />
Badiou, Alain<br />
America and Roman Empire 211<br />
anti-communitarian communitarian 172<br />
Being and Truth-Event 128-35,237-8<br />
beyond the Good 161<br />
Christianity and psychoanalysis 145-51<br />
differences with Lacan 3, 159-64<br />
fidelity to the Truth-Event 164,166-7<br />
ideology and the Truth-Event 141-5<br />
influence of Althusser 128<br />
is the gap the subject? 158-9<br />
Master/Hysteric/University 164-5<br />
return to the Substance 209<br />
St Paul and psychoanalysis 153-4<br />
subjectivity 182-4<br />
transformation of Truth-Event into<br />
universal 157-8<br />
undecidability of the Event 135-41<br />
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[[Category:People|Badiou, Alai]]<br />
[[Category:Philosophy|Badiou, Alai]]<br />
[[Category:Politics|Badiou, Alai]]<br />
[[Category:Political theory|Badiou, Alai]]<br />
[[Category:Marxist theory|Badiou, Alai]]<br />
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<br />
==References==<br />
<references /><br />
<br />
[[Category:People|Badiou, Alain]]<br />
[[Category:Index|Badiou, Alain]]<br />
[[Category:Tarrying with the Negative|Badiou, Alain]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=Louis_Althusser&diff=43736Louis Althusser2019-04-15T01:05:06Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>'''Louis Pierre Althusser''' (October 16, 1918 - October 23, 1990) was a [[Marxist]] [[philosopher]]. He was born in [[Algeria]] and studied at the prestigious [[École Normale Supérieure]] in [[Paris]], where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy. He was a leading academic proponent of the [[French Communist Party]] and his arguments were a response to multiple threats to the ideological foundations of that socialist project. These included both the influence of [[empiricism]] which was beginning to influence [[Marxist]] sociology and economics, and growing interest in humanistic and democratic socialist orientations which were beginning to cause division in the European Communist Parties. Althusser is commonly referred to as a [[Structural Marxism|Structural Marxist]], although his relationship to other schools of French [[structuralism]] is not a simple affiliation.<br />
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=In the work of Slavoj Žižek=<br />
The work of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser is important for Žižek in a variety of ways. This is most apparent in Žižek’s conception of ideology, as it is at least partially against the backdrop of Althusser’s own conception of ideology that Žižek’s is constructed. In order to see this relationship, we should first say a bit about Althusser’s conception of ideology.<br />
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Althusser rejects the traditional Marxist conception of ideology as a kind of simple false consciousness that can be completely overcome or set right by proper Marxist analysis. Rather, for Althusser, ideology is always in operation in our subjective awareness. Th at is, as Althusser puts it in For Marx, all consciousness is ideological (Althusser 1969: 33). According to Althusser, even though particular historical ideological forms come into being and pass away, much like the Lacanian concept of the “symbolic”, the structure of ideology is an ever-present feature of conscious life. His theory of interpellation, given in the famous piece entitled “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Toward an Investigation” (Althuser 1971: 85 –126), is meant to further expand on and explain this point.<br />
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In this essay, Althusser distinguishes between what he calls “Repressive State Apparatuses”, or RSAs, which are those parts of the state (including the state itself) that function to enforce the domination of the ruling class through violence (here, Althusser cites institutions such as the prisons, law, the courts, the police and the military), and what he calls the “Ideological State Apparatuses”, or ISAs, which have the same function (to enforce the domination of the ruling class) but operate differently (''ibid.'': 143). ISAs work not through violence, but through the reproduction of a given set of historical ideologies. Some of the examples of ISAs that Althusser provides are schools, churches, trade unions, familial structures and other cultural institutions, practices and traditions. In the ISA, ideology itself takes a material form. We are, claims Althusser, immersed in ideology because it is materially represented in the multitude of institutions and practices that we engage in and are engaged by. How do the ISAs enforce ideological structures? Althusser’s answer is that they do this through what he calls “interpellation”.<br />
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According to Althusser, one is “interpellated” or “hailed” by an ISA when one recognizes oneself as the “subject” of the ISA’s call or as the one who is being hailed. His example is the policeman who hails a passerby on the street by saying “Hey you there!” It is in turning around and responding to the hail that one becomes a “subject” of the call and is thus interpellated by the hail. This is because, as Althusser points out, one “has recognised that the hail was ‘really’ addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone else)” (''ibid.'': 174). We are, argues Althusser, always in a state of being interpellated in this way. When one goes to church, one is interpellated by a particular set of religious practices to be the subject of such practices; when one goes shopping, one is interpellated by the practices that are a part of shopping to be a subject that shops; when one walks onto the university campus, one is interpellated by the university to be a particular kind of subject (a student, or a teacher, or an administrator, etc.); and so on. By engaging in any material social practice or with any material institution, we admit (unconsciously) that we are the “subject” of such a practice, and in doing this we ''become'' the kind of subject that engages in that practice and thus are constituted by it. Furthermore, the recognition of oneself as a subject of ideology is not just the recognition of oneself as such a subject at that moment. Rather, one recognizes – or misrecognizes – oneself as always having been such a subject. Th is is an important point. When I am interpellated and I recognize myself as the one being hailed, included in that recognition is the misrecognition that I have ''always already'' been the subject that is subjected to such practices and is beholden to them. Althusser points out here that: “Ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: ''individuals are always already subjects''” (''ibid.'': 176).<br />
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Returning, then, to the point above about the ever-present nature of ideology, not only is it the case that since we are constantly in a process of being interpellated we are always already subjects, Althusser also argues that, although ideological practices may diff er at different historical times and places, t''he structure of interpellation is ever present''. This is what is meant by his claim that “Ideology has no history” (''ibid.'': 175). We always find ourselves interpellated as subjects by the material institutions, traditions and practices that exist for us at a given time and place, and while these change, the process of our constitution by them remains stable.<br />
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Though Žižek takes much from Althusser, and he partially agrees with Althusser regarding the latter’s claims about subjective constitution out of the communal social material (the ISAs and their process of interpellation), Žižek wants to claim that the ISAs are not material in quite the way that Althusser envisions them to be. Further, Žižek thinks that, although subjectivity as interpellated can and does often act as a site for the reproduction of existing class divisions and power structures, it is not solely subordinated to his logic, as Althusser argues. On Žižek’s revision of the Althusserian view, it only appears (to subjects themselves) that they are constrained in this way. In explaining this, Žižek invokes the Lacanian concept of the “big Other” (what, in this context, we might liken to the particular totality of ISAs that exist at a given time):<blockquote>With Lacan’s “big Other” the perspective is completely the opposite: the very “positing” of the big Other is a subjective gesture, that is, the “big Other” is a virtual entity that exists only through the subject’s presupposition (this moment is missing in Althusser’s notion of the “Ideological State Apparatuses”, with its emphasis on the “materiality” of the big Other, its material existence in ideological institutions and ritualized practices – Lacan’s big Other is, on the contrary, ultimately virtual and as such, in its most basic dimension, “immaterial”). (''LC'': 113–14) </blockquote>The view that there is such a totality of ISAs, which are both external to the subject and inescapable, is itself the result of the interpellative process, in so far as this is placed on the world by consciousness-as-interpellated. Althusser misses this, according to Žižek, because of his belief in the external-as-material nature of the ISA and its power of interpellation. He does not sufficiently recognize what Žižek sees as a dialectical reduplication inherent to the interpellative process and ultimately to the material existence of the ISA itself.<br />
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A brief discussion of Žižek’s reading of Hegel’s thought (to enlist another of Žižek’s intellectual touchstones) regarding habituation should be helpful in making sense of this. As Žižek argues, habituation is, for Hegel, the means whereby what is external (the Althusserian ISA, for instance) becomes internalized in such a way as to constitute the individual’s awareness (in interpellation), and then is redeployed by that individual as that through which the world is comprehended, structured and organized. The world appears to us in the way that it does as a result of such activity, which is itself a reduplication of that which first constructs this activity:<blockquote>The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the only way to account for the distinction between the “inside” and “outside” constitutive of a living organism is to posit a kind of self-reflexive reversal by means of which – to put it in Hegelese – the One of an organism as a Whole retroactively posits as its result, as that which dominates and regulates, the set of its own causes (i.e. the very multiple processes out of which it emerged). (MM: 106)</blockquote>In interpellation, I am, ''pace'' Althusser, subjected to the materially existing practices and structures of my socio-historical community, which are then reduplicated in me as the inner structure of my subjectivity (in habituation, I internalize these practices – what I am is the internalization of them), and at the same time the “inner” is then thrust back onto the world and is what acts as the “virtual” or “immaterial” limit of the world itself. In other words, I experience this limit – set by me in my subjective conceptual presuppositions, which posit the existence of the big Other – as an externally imposed limit. In this way, my own positing activity becomes that which limits me (and my conception of my world) without my knowing it. Žižek continues: “In this way – and only in this way – an organism is no longer limited by external conditions, but is fundamentally self-limited. Again, as Hegel would have articulated it, life emerges when the external limitation (of an entity by its environs) turns into self limitation” (ibid.). Put concisely, the Althusserian ISA is, as Žižek argues, not that which is external to me and limits my subjectivity (as Althusser understands it), but is rather that internalized externality that becomes a virtualized subjective positing or presupposition through which I limit myself and thereby also limit my world. In this reduplication, I limit myself but experience this limitation as coming from the world (the ISA is, for me, external to my existence). I do not comprehend it as emanating from me or, more precisely, being supported and propped up by my recognition of myself as its subject in interpellation. So ultimately, for Žižek, the ISAs themselves do in fact operate in the ways that Althusser has described – they are mechanisms of interpellation – but their material existence hinges on the very subjects they interpellate in so far as such subjects act as their support.<br />
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[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]</div>TheoryLeakshttps://nosubject.com/index.php?title=The_Act&diff=43735The Act2019-04-15T01:04:13Z<p>TheoryLeaks: </p>
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<div>{{Topp}}acte{{Bottom}}<br />
[[Image:Kida_a.gif |right|frame]]<br />
<br />
=Jacques Lacan=<br />
==Behavior==<br />
An "[[act]]" is not mere "[[act|behavior]]" -- such as that of all '''[[nature|animals]]''' -- but a uniquely [[act|''human'' act]], "since to our [[knowledge]] there is no other [[act]] but the [[human]] one."<ref>{{S11}} p. 50</ref> <br />
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==Ethics of Psychoanalysis==<br />
The "[[act]]" is an '''[[ethics|ethical concept]]''' insofar as the '''[[subject]]''' can be held '''[[responsibility|responsible]]''' for it.<br />
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The [[psychoanalytic]] concept of '''[[responsibility]]''' is complicated in [[psychoanalysis]] by the discovery that, in addition to his [[conscious]] plans, the '''[[subject]]''' also has '''[[unconscious]] [[intention]]s'''. Hence someone may well commit an [[act]] which he claims was un[[intention]]al, but which [[analysis]] reveals to be the expression of an '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]'''. <br />
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[[Freud]] called these [[act]]s "'''[[parapraxes]]'''," or "'''[[bungled actions]]'''." They are "[[bungled]]" only from the point of view of the [[conscious]] [[intention]], since they are successful in expressing an '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]'''.<ref>[[{{FB}}|Freud, Sigmund]]. ''[[Works of Sigmund Freud|The Psychopathology of Everyday Life]]''. [[SE]] VI. 1901.</ref><br />
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==Analysand==<br />
In '''[[psychoanalytic]] [[treatment]]''' the [[subject]] is faced with the '''[[ethical]] [[duty]]''' of assuming '''[[responsibility]]''' even for the '''[[unconscious]] [[desire]]s''' expressed in his '''[[action]]s'''. <br />
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He must recognize even apparently accidental '''[[action]]s''' as true [[act]]s which express an [[intention]], albeit [[unconscious]], and assume this [[intention]] as his own. <br />
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Neither "'''[[acting out]]'''" or a "'''[[passage to the act]]'''" are true [[act]]s, since the '''[[subject]]''' does not assume '''[[responsibility]]''' for his '''[[desire]]''' in these [[action]]s.<br />
<br />
==Analyst==<br />
The '''[[ethics]] of [[psychoanalysis]]''' enjoin the [[analyst]] to assume [[responsibility]] for his or her [[act]]s (i.e. interventions in the [[treatment]]).<br />
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The [[analyst]] must be guided (in these interventions) by an appropriate [[desire]], which [[Lacan]] calls the '''[[desire of the analyst]]'''.<br />
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An intervention can only be called a true "[[act|psychoanalytic act]]" when it succeeds in expressing the '''[[desire of the analyst]]''' -- that is, when it helps the '''[[analysand]]''' to move towards the '''[[end of analysis]]'''. <br />
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[[Lacan]] dedicates a year of his [[seminar]] to discussing further the nature of the [[act|psychoanalytic act]].<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Seminar XI|Le Séminaire. Livre XV. L'acte psychanalytique, 1967-68]]''. Unpublished.</ref><br />
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==Conclusion==<br />
A '''[[bungled action]]''' is, as has been stated, successful from the point of view of the [[unconscious]]. <br />
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Nevertheless, this success is only partial because the [[unconscious]] [[desire]] is expressed in a distorted form. <br />
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It follows that, when it is fully and [[conscious]]ly assumed, "suicide is the only completely successful act."<ref>[[Lacan|Lacan, Jacques]]. ''[[Television|Télévision]]'', Paris: Seuil, 1973. ''[[Television|Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment]]'', ed. Joan Copjec, trans. Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton, 1990]. p.66-7</ref><br />
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The [[act]] expresses completely an [[intention]] which is both [[conscious]] and [[unconscious]], the [[conscious]] assumption of the '''[[unconscious]] [[death drive]]''' (on the other hand, a sudden impulsive suicide attempt is not a true [[act]], but probably a '''[[passage to the act]]'''). <br />
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The '''[[death drive]]''' is thus closely connected with the [[ethics|ethical domain]] in [[Lacan]]'s thought.<br />
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= In the work of Slavoj Žižek =<br />
The Act (also referred to as an ethical Act or authentic Act) is a foundational concept in Žižek’s philosophy and serves as the key to understanding the political and ethical dimensions of his thought. Th e term first appears in ''[[The Sublime Object of Ideology]]'', where Žižek distinguishes pragmatic-political acts from the more formal “act before act”, by which the subject “structures his perception of the world in advance in a way that opens the space for his intervention”, and which allows him retroactively to posit the very presuppositions of his activity (''SO'': 247). It is this Hegelian concept of “positing the presuppositions” that Žižek revisits throughout his oeuvre, combining it with Lacanian psychoanalysis and the philosophy of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling to conceive of the Act within a formal structure of paradox. “An act accomplishes what, within the given symbolic universe, appears to be ‘impossible’, yet it changes its conditions so that it creates retroactively the conditions of its own possibility” (''CHU'': 121). An Act short-circuits the realms of contingency and necessity, immanence and transcendence, politics and ethics and cause and effect, for it is made without strategic calculations or consideration of outcomes; it opens a moment when absolute freedom coincides with an unconditional necessity, a moment when the subject is suspended between its being and meaning.<br />
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Throughout his work Žižek offers countless examples from film, literature, religion, psychoanalysis and politics to illustrate the Act as this formal opening that changes (retroactively) the reality from which it arose. Antigone’s refusal to bury her brother without a proper funeral retroactively provided an opening to posit the Good outside the limits of Creon’s law; the Christian God sacrificed his only son on the cross, which opened the space for belief; Lacan’s dissolution of his own École freudienne de Paris in 1979 served to clear the path for a new beginning; Howard Roark, the self-made architect in Ayn Rand’s ''The Fountainhead'', destroyed one of his own buildings in an act of freedom that illuminated how we are all bound by the symbolic order; Sethe in Toni Morrison’s ''Beloved'' killed her own children to free them from a life of slavery; Keyser Soze’s (Kevin Spacey) Act of killing his family in the film ''The Usual Suspects'' set him free from the hold of his pursuers and free to pursue them, just as Mel Gibson’s character in the film ''Ransom'' did when he turned the tables on his son’s kidnappers. All of these Acts entail a logic of “striking at oneself”, of sacrificing what one treasures most in order to go beyond the limits of the Law, to act without the guarantee of an Other. Thus, the authentic Act is to be distinguished from both the hysterical “acting out”, staged for an Other, and the psychotic ''passsage à l‘acte'', an act of meaningless destruction that suspends the Other.<br />
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Because an Act is grounded only in itself, it appears as mad or even monstrous according to the norms of the socio-symbolic order; but once enacted it serves to reconfigure what is taken as mad, ethical and even real. Thus: <blockquote>act is therefore not “abyssal” in the sense of an irrational gesture that eludes all rational criteria; it can and should be judged by universal rational criteria, the point is only that it changes (re-creates) the very criteria by which it should be judged … it does more than intervene in reality in the sense of “having actual consequences” – it redefines what counts as reality. (T?: 171–2)</blockquote>But an Act does even more than change what counts as reality, because it further exposes how reality itself is not totally ontologically complete. Th at is, at its most fundamental, an Act reveals a deadlock or inconsistency at the core of the socio-symbolic order; it exposes how reality is split from within. Or, in Žižek’s words, “an act disturbs the symbolic field into which it intervenes not out of nowhere, but precisely from the standpoint of this inherent impossibility, stumbling block, which is its hidden, disavowed structuring principle” (''CHU'': 125). Žižek offers te example of Tito, who in 1948 declared Yugoslavia a non-aligned state and thus accomplished “the impossible”, for his Act revealed a crack in the Stalinist world communist movement by another communist (''E!'': 46). Similarly, Lenin’s contingent Act of revolution in Russia in 1917 opened the space (retroactively) to mobilize the working class to form a new majority under communism and exposed the exploitation of the previous Tsarist rule (''LC'': 311).<br />
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An authentic Act follows the paradoxical logic of Hegel’s “negation of negation” and Lacan’s formula of feminine sexuation; that is, an Act does not pose itself against a master-signifier or work in opposition to a symbolic order because it exists totally within it, yet once decided, it reveals how this order is not-all, incomplete; it opens up the void for which the Symbolic stands in. In order to illustrate the Act as a feminine gesture, Žižek refers to Sophocles’ Antigone and offers two ways to conceive of her refusal to Creon to bury her brother without a proper funeral. Th e first reading follows Lacan’s position in ''[[Seminar VII|Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis]]'', which sees Antigone’s Act as authentic because she redefines the Good itself outside of Creon’s Law. Žižek’s alternative reading, however, locates Antigone’s Act from within the logic of masculine ethics, for when she lists the things she is sacrificing (a future life with a husband and children of her own) she does not totally identify with her Cause, but, instead, presents herself as the exception; she invokes the Thing for which her sacrifice is made, her future family; and thus becomes a sublime figure that draws our pity (''FA'': 154). Žižek contrasts Antigone to two other women in literature who, instead of sacrificing their Cause for something, sacrifice their Cause in the name of nothing: Medea of Greek tragedy and her contemporary counterpart, Sethe in Toni Morison’s ''Beloved''. Both of these figures commit an authentic Act when they murder their children, the former to destroy her husband Jason’s precious Thing, and the latter to save her children from slavery (FA: 153).<br />
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In ''[[The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters|Indivisible Remainder]]'' and ''[[The Abyss of Freedom|Abyss of Freedom]]'' Žižek reads this feminine logic of the not-all through Schelling’s materialist philosophy (as found in his three Weltalter drafts) to consider the primordial Act of beginning. Drawing from Schelling’s metaphysics of “contraction and expansion”, “form and ground” and “the rotary motion of the drives”, Žižek posits that the Act and the master-signifier are logically interconnected: while the Act serves to break through a limit, deadlock or crack in the Symbolic, simultaneously the symbolic order unfolds only to “normalize” the Act. Th us the Act and the master-signifier are not two distinct phenomena, but rather two sides of the same entity. Th ere is, according to Žižek, no first primordial Act that serves as a temporal beginning; rather, there is an ongoing cycle of the master-signifier and the Act in logical, as distinct from causal, sequence (''IR'': 155–61). The rotary motion of the drives opens onto desire; the movement from the Real to the Symbolic occurs in a series of doublings and re-markings. Again, the Act serves to reveal how the symbolic order is already split from within, and this radicalizes the Other, reconfiguring its founding coordinates.<br />
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In his treatment of the Act Žižek eventually follows Lacan’s move away from Antigone’s ethics towards the more silent but no less traumatic Act illustrated by Paul Claudel’s character Sygne de Coûfontaine in ''The Hostage''. Whereas Antigone maintained her desire and accepted her Fate by way of protesting against an external prohibition (Creon’s Law), Sygne’s Act of taking the bullet meant for her despised husband was rather an Act done according to “the innermost freedom of her being” (''LN'': 81). Th at is, hers is not a tragically sublime Act done for the sake of a higher Cause, but rather a non-response, which short-circuits the dimensions of form and content, meaning and being. When her husband asks his dying wife why she saved him, Sygne does not reply, but rather her body responds with a tic, a grimace, which signals not a sign of love, but rather the refusal of an explanation. Sygne’s “No”, according to Žižek, “is not a ‘No’ to a particular content … but a ‘No as such’, the form-of-No which is in itself the whole content, behind which there is nothing”. Synge’s tic is thus “ex-timate”, in the Lacanian sense, for it embodies a little piece of the Real, “the excremental remainder of a disgusting ‘pathological’ tic that sticks out of the symbolic form” (''PV'': 83).<br />
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It is this “No” that Žižek proposes as the kind of political Act that is needed today when capitalism assumes every transgression, becoming a system that no longer excludes its excess but posits it as its driving force; a system that is covered over by our collective fetishistic disavowal. Žižek here takes up Badiou’s notion of subtraction, which, like Hegel’s ''Aufhebung'', posits a withdrawal from being immersed in a situation in such a way “that the withdrawal renders visible the ‘minimal difference’ sustaining the situation’s multiplicity, and thereby causes its disintegration” (''FT'': 129). A political Act today would be not a new movement proposing a “positive” agenda for change, but rather an interruption of the present symbolic order. And it is here where we note the primary diff erence between Žižek’s Act and Badiou’s Event. Žižek writes in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'':<blockquote>Lacan insists on the primacy of the (negative) act over the (positive) establishment of a “new harmony” via the intervention of some new Master-Signifier, while for Badiou, the different facets of negativity (ethical catastrophes) are reduced to so many versions of the “betrayal” of (or infidelity to, or denial of) the positive Truth-Event. (''TS'': 159)</blockquote>For Žižek, as for Lacan, it is the death-drive that is at work in the authentic Act, and so for both thinkers the Act is a purely negative category; it offers a way for the subject to break out of the limits of Being; it opens the gap of negativity, of a void prior to its being filled in (''TS'': 160). Such an Act is presented by Žižek in ''[[The Parallax View]]'' in the example of Hermann Melville’s character Bartleby in ''Bartleby the Scrivener'', a subject who interrupts the present political movement with his incessant and ambiguous retort “I would prefer not to.” His “No” affirms a non-predicate and does not oppose or transgress against an Other, but rather opens up a space outside of the dominant hegemonic order and its negation. What this more silent Act does, according to Žižek, is open the space of the gap of the minimal difference “between the set of social regulations and the void of their absence”. In other words, Bartleby’s gesture (his Act of saying “No”) “is what remains of the supplement to the Law when its place is emptied of all its obscene superego content” (''PV'': 382).<br />
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In his later works (''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', ''[[Living in the End Times]]'' and ''[[Less Than Nothing]]''), Žižek combines Hegel’s “positing the presuppositions” together with Jean-Pierre Dupuy’s conception of “enlightened catastrophism” (''LN'': 982) to propose how an Act would present us with the (im)possibility of retroactively changing the past (of our future). His logic is as follows: our situation (our physical survival, for example) is doomed; we are already lost, and the only way to save ourselves is to act as if the apocalypse has already happened. That is, to get beyond our fetishistic disavowal and the madness of global capitalism requires that we re-orient ourselves not to death, but to the death-drive (requiring us to use the Real to reconfigure our symbolic order). By positing that the worst has happened, we would be free to (retroactively) create the conditions for a new order, to choose a path not taken, a prior cause given up as lost. We repeat not the same event in another variation, but rather bring into being (through repetition, in the sense of repeating the cycle of abyssal Act and master-signifier) something new. Every ethical edifice, as Žižek argues, is grounded in an abyssal Act, and it is psychoanalysis that “confronts us with the zero-level of politics, a pre-political ‘transcendental’ condition of the possibility of politics”, which is the gap that opens the space for the political Act (''LN'': 963). Real change must coincide with our acceptance that there is no Other; and with this formal opening, actual freedom could erupt from an authentic political Act that would in turn change the very field of possibility itself. What Žižek’s theorizing of the Act offers us is a way to conceive of the impossible as possible, to see that reality is incomplete and split from within, that there is another world to construct, even if we cannot grasp it in our present moment. <br />
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==See Also==<br />
{{See}}||<br />
* [[Analyst]]<br />
* [[Consciousness]]<br />
* [[Death drive]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Desire]]<br />
* [[Desire of the analyst]]<br />
* [[End of analysis]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Ethics]]<br />
* [[Inherent transgression]]<br />
* [[Law]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Schelling]]<br />
* [[Subject]]<br />
* [[Symbolic]]<br />
||<br />
* [[Treatment]]<br />
* [[Unconscious]]{{Also}}<br />
{{OK}}<br />
[[Category:Practice]]<br />
[[Category:Treatment]]<br />
[[Category:Zizek Dictionary]]<br />
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