Peter Sloterdijk. If You Have Never Thought Grey: A Theory of Color. Translated by Corey Dansereau and Robert Hughes, Polity Press, 2024/2025 (in production).
Laurent de Sutter. Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century. Translated by Robert Hughes, Polity Press, 2025 (under contract). Address: Ohio, U.S.A.
Tallinn, Estonia
This monograph argues for the importance and fecundity of thinking through the phenomenon of the ... more This monograph argues for the importance and fecundity of thinking through the phenomenon of the body-thought – as in the event of art, when the subject’s body registers the sense of a work, even as cognitive sense-making proves inadequate. It argues for an understanding of the subject as characterized by its existential betweenitude: split between body- and cognitive-thought, between the world in its sensuous immediacy and the world as rendered meaningful by reflection, between our longing for the shelter of a ‘safe haven’ and the anxious reality of our uncanny displacements. Other theses theorize the body by highlighting the specific role of visuality in the figuration, formation, and deformation of body-thought. These theses together argue that the aesthetic encounter produces affect by exciting a destabilization of our image-grounded subjective coherence.
This study examines three works of early American fiction—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Washi... more This study examines three works of early American fiction—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun—as they bring the resources of literary writing to bear on the fundamental difficulties of thinking about ethics. Each of these narratives, as I show, dramatizes a curious problem of witnessing. Thus, in the revolutionary reverberations of Sleepy Hollow, in the uncanny appearance of its headless horseman, and in the unsettling disappearance of its village schoolmaster, this project finds the force of an enigmatic ethical imperative: an obligation to bear witness to an event by putting it properly into language, but also the confounding impossibility of determining the precise nature of that event. Something analogous is at work in the other two literary texts as well: out of an overwhelming encounter with death, we find not only a certain impasse of expression and understanding, but also a powerful ethical obligation to speak and to tell a tale.
To further develop the theoretical stakes of these literary readings, the book also examines the work of four twentieth-century continental thinkers, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou, who, in psychoanalysis and philosophy, renewed the effort to think about a non-cognitive dimension of ethics. Moreover, as this book argues, each in their various ways proposed aesthetics or art as an approach to this dimension. Thus, it is shown that literature, as a mode of expression that draws its force from a certain relation to the incomprehensible, the unknown, or the unconscious, is able to open up that part of ethics that has resisted more traditional philosophy.
The unique contribution of this book, as a comparativist analysis of American literature, is to bring nineteenth-century American literature into contact with the continental tradition in aesthetics. By situating early American fictions as participants within a larger discourse about art and ethics, this book thereby broadens the possibilities for understanding these texts beyond their traditional historicist confines, and does so without denying the importance of history. And, as a theoretical meditation on the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, this book claims importance for the way it describes a hitherto obscured trend in continental thought to argue that this intersection of ethics and aesthetics is both necessary and inevitable. Finally, this project points to an overlooked common lineage, descending from German Romanticism, between American Romanticism and contemporary continental thought: a shared supposition about the limits of reason as a mode of presenting the essence of art and ethics and a shared faith in the promise of literature to speak to, or open up this subjective space of foundational ethics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1
Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
In Lieu of a Historical Introduction
Chapter 1: Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History 13
Rhythmic Beauty and Dreamy Charm: Memory, History, and the Pleasurable Tale
Sleepy Hollow and the Nightmare of History
Fearful Pleasures: From Trauma to the Uncanny
Postscript: The Moral of the Story and What it Goes to Prove
Chapter 2: Lacan and the Beyond of Language: From Art to Ethics 39
The Work of Art, the Emptiness of the Signifier, the Representation of the Thing
The Head of Beatrice: The Mystery of the Beautiful and the Limit of Death
Ethics: From the Vicissitudes of Being to the Passion of the Signifier
Chapter 3: Brown’s Wieland and the Ethical Circumscription of Death 61
Literary Morality and the Romance of Family Murder
The Presence of the Divine Word and the Movement of the Signifier
The Unforsaken Image
Writing out of Death
Chapter 4: Heideggerian Ethics: The Voice of Art and the Call to Being 85
Language, Poetry, and the Unconcealment of Being
Heidegger’s Van Gogh: The Shoes That Stared, the Painting That Spoke
The Call of Language and the Obligation to Bear Witness to One’s Existence
Not at Home: Heidegger and the Ethical Uncanny
Chapter 5: Levinas: Art and the Transcendence of Solitude 113
Art and the Grammar of Being
Aesthetics, Vulnerability, and Proximity to the Other
Saying the Word and Seeking the Other in the Poem
Irresistible: The Event of Art and the Call for an Ethical Criticism
Chapter 6: Endings: Ethics, Enigma, and Address in The Marble Faun 137
Hawthorne’s Final Romance
Time, the Eternal City, and the Disadvantage of History for Life
The End of the Romance, the Death of the Reader, and the Impossible Address
Chapter 7: Riven: Badiou’s Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma 159
The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject
A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess
Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics
This outstanding collection of papers by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin is re... more This outstanding collection of papers by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin is remarkable for its careful attention to the relationship between Lacanian concepts and their function within a clinical setting. The case material in this collection is abundant—not merely illustrative or anecdotal, but truly integral to the evolution and presentation of the Lacanian ideas that guide them. The emphasis on the signifier as it marks a particular subjective movement with the psychoanalytic treatment is, therefore, vividly presented, both in its concrete particularity and in all of its theoretical richness. The specifically clinical orientation of these papers marks this collection as an especially important contribution for a number of English-speaking audiences. Firstly, it grounds Lacanian concepts within the context of their origination. Ideas that may become overly abstract, from the “phallus” to the “Imaginary,” are given depth by reference to the Clinic. Secondly, such presentations open Lacanian concepts to a clinical audience, an audience perhaps professionally indifferent to Lacanian applications in philosophy, gender studies, or literary theory.
Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin, as founders of the École freudienne du Québec and the Gifric group have long been involved in political, academic, and clinical activities and have, moreover, developed a vital and well-respected clinical practice within Quebec. Gifric is especially well known for its innovative work with young adult psychotics, although the psychoanalytic practice of this group is wide ranging, as this collection will also attest. Although the authors have presented and published widely in North America and are active in a number of psychoanalytic organizations, there is no currently existing collection in English that presents their careful and innovative work. This book represents just such a collection.
The papers may be understood as addressing four areas of interest to academic Lacanians and to English-speaking psychoanalysts seriously interested in Lacan. The early chapters are devoted to the general concepts (for example, the jouissance of the Other, the sexual division, and the paternal function) and key terms (dream, signifier, and interpretation) that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The next chapters focus on the groundbreaking clinic of psychosis that Gifric has pioneered in Québec—how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. The next chapters turn toward the second phase of analytic treatment, introducing a new set of terms—the letter of the body, the symptom, the fantasy—to understand the genesis within the transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject’s assumption of the Other’s lack. The concluding chapters are especially rich in clinical material, and broaden the understanding of the analytic clinic by discussing the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: obsessional and hysterical neurosis, perversion, and (again) psychosis.
The volume is co-edited and introduced by Robert Hughes and Kareen Malone, an academic in the humanities and a psychologist. These two differing perspectives attempt to balance a certain tension in the reception of Lacan—namely, the inappropriate division between his theoretical elaborations and their clinical instantiation. It is the implicit argument of all the chapters, and is explicitly argued in the Introduction, that the crucial event of Lacan’s teaching and theoretical articulation follows from the clinical encounter, and that this encounter remains the core of any truly Lacanian theoretical elaboration, whether explicitly or implicitly. Although there are a number of rigorous theoretical accounts of Lacan, an indescribably important dimension is lost when any such account does not consider the clinical referent of so many of Lacan’s ideas. The clinical practice of psychoanalysis is the experiment with the unconscious, begun by Freud, that Lacan sought to deepen and formalize. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious returns us to that experiment.
The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society called this “an important book that must interest anyone concerned with the practical import of Lacan’s work, but also anyone drawn to Lacanian theory.” The Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association writes “If After Lacan had simply explicated Lacanian concepts and animated them with clinical vignettes, it would have accomplished a great deal. But clearly this volume is more than that. It reshapes the psychoanalytic landscape…"
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Dialectic of Theory and Clinic. Hughes and Malone 1. Some questions in the Lacanian field and the work of Gifric 2. Academic interest in the Lacanian clinic 3. Clinical interest in Lacanian theory 4. Broader debates 5. General summary of chapters 6. Limited Glossary of Terms 7. Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The Trauma of Language. Cantin 1. Human beings as a product of language 2. Language makes real jouissance impossible 3. The introduction of an other jouissance and the paternal function 4. The case of Myriam
Chapter 2: The Jouissance of the Other and the Sexual Division in Psychoanalysis. Apollon 1. Individual satisfaction and the jouissance of the Other 2. The sexual division: procreation, jouissance, and the ethics of masculinity 3. The sexual division: feminine jouissance beyond the phallic 4. Castration: the inadequacy of the Other and the insufficiency of the word
Chapter 3: The Signifier. Bergeron 1. The signifier: a structure behind the scenes 2. The signifier of analytic discourse as a rupture in meaning 3. The navel of the dream: a hole in meaning where jouissance returns 4. Eve of Destruction: the signifier as metaphor of the subject and metonymy of desire
Chapter 4: The Work of the Dream and Jouissance in Treatment of the Psychotic. Bergeron 1. The tyranny of the jouissance of the Other and the absence of the symbolic father 2. Symbolic frame for treatment: delusion to dream, knowledge to ignorance, object to subject 3. The dream as staging the structure of the subject's relation to the Other 4. Bandages on the knees: the dream, the chain of signifiers, and the unrepresented 5. Dreams of the hand: bringing the symptom to pierce the delusion
Chapter 5: From Delusion to Dream. Cantin 1. Dreams treat the real with something symbolic 2. The function of delusion in psychosis: the case of Mr. Owens 3. Introducing dream work in place of the workings of delusion: the case of Mr. T.
Chapter 6: The Letter of the Body. Apollon 1. Transference and the trauma of language: the subject, jouissance, and the signifier 2. The parceled body as a writing of jouissance by the agency of the letter 3. The clinic of the symptom and the ethical action of analysis
Chapter 7: The Symptom. Apollon 1. Jouissance, the object, and the problem of satisfaction 2. Symptom as an inscription and division of jouissance: an anorexic in love 3. The passage to the fantasy as a structuration of leftover jouissance 4. The traversal of the fantasy
Chapter 8: From Symptom to Fantasy. Apollon 1. Marguerite’s dreams: the symptom as a writing of fatal jouissance 2. The clinic of the symptom, or the Freudian passage from symptom to fantasy 3. The Master and Marguerite: the Lacanian clinic and the working through of fantasy
Chapter 9: Perverse Features and the Future of the Drive in Obsessional Neurosis. Bergeron 1. The case of Mr. Beauregard 2. Childhood identifications: ego ideal, ideal ego, and the movement of desire 3. The obsessional, as the imaginary phallus of the mother, looking for the father 4. Perverse features in the obsessional's family and the acting out of fantasy 5. Passage from seduction to castration and the ethical act of the obsessional’s analysis
Chapter 10: Perversion and Hysteria. Cantin 1. The choice and solution of the subject in perversion: jouissance, signifier, and the Other 2. The clinical experience of perversion: the case of Mr. Buckold 3. The hysteric with the pervert
Chapter 11: The Fate of Jouissance in the Pervert-Hysteric Couple. Cantin 1. The drive as an effect of language 2. Seduction as refuge from castration: the letter of the body, the insufficiency of the signifier 3. The pervert's response to the hysteric 4. The pervert and the effect of the signifier 5. The contract and the eradication of the Other 6. Desire leads back to the drive 7. Violence and aggressivity: the violence of the demonstration
Chapter 12: Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword. Bergeron 1. Violence in works of art 2. Mishima's specific violence 3. The production of the Thing in language 4. The "letters of the body" and the return of das Ding 5. The failure of masculine identification 6. The unveiling of the original fantasy 7. From the pen to the sword: the quest for the phallus and for a meaning to his death
This essay reads a short narrative, “Savoir” by Hélène Cixous, to describe susceptibility as a pr... more This essay reads a short narrative, “Savoir” by Hélène Cixous, to describe susceptibility as a problem organized around two lines of impingement: between subject and world and between consciousness and the wayward impulses of interior life. The young girl in Cixous’s text suffers a moment of disorientation and distress one misty morning and, against presumptions of inviolability and ideals of subjective consistency, this unhappy event comes to resonate with her disappointed trust in the generosity of the world, her anxious sense of betrayal with respect to those who ought to protect her and her insecurity about her own role in this complex of associations. The frame of susceptibility thus opens up a space for Cixous’s reader and this essay to think the subject in her inconsistency and self-strangeness.
ABSTRACT
In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocri... more ABSTRACT
In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocrisy in a non-moral sense. Ruminating upon the example of Molière’s Tartuffe, Serres takes up the scandalous imposture of the hypocrite and he shows, at the heart of comic pretence, what this essay describes as an underdetermination of identity and individuation. That is, where readers, theatregoers, and participants in public discourse would ground thought upon a principle of determinacy and individuation—for example determinations of the basic wickedness of hypocrites and parasites—philosophical considerations of these figures (and the phenomenon of comic action) explode this principle to suggest an ontological and discursive space of inconsistency and intermediacy. By examining Tartuffe’s ingratiating language of piety and the play’s surprising figures of grace, this essay shows how discursive systems and social systems are equally devoted to ideals of determinable identity that leave them vulnerable to operators who can discern and exploit the inevitable sites of latent incoherence and inconsistency. The essay concludes by developing Serres’s notions of comedy as a play between consistency and inconsistency, individuation and disindividuation, a sad and severed fragmentariness (as with Plato’s Aristophanes), but also the generative spawning of a supplemental comic critical consciousness.
Résumé
Dans Le Parasite (1980), le philosophe Michel Serres invite le lecteur à penser l’hypocrisie de manière non-morale. En méditant l’exemple du Tartuffe de Molière, Serres se saisit de l’imposture scandaleuse de l’hypocrite et révèle, au cœur de toute prétention comique, ce que cet essai décrit comme une sous-détermination de l’identité et de l’individuation. C’est-à-dire, là où le lecteur, spectateur et participant du discours public fonderaient la pensée sur un principe de détermination et d’individuation – par exemple la détermination de la méchanceté fondamentale de l’hypocrite et du parasite – les considérations philosophiques de ces figures (et le phénomène de l’action comique) font exploser ce principe au profit de la suggestion d’un espace discursif et ontologique incohérent et intermédiaire. En examinant le langage de piété de Tartuffe et la figure surprenante de la grâce, cet essai montre la manière dont les systèmes discursifs et sociaux sont autant l’un que l’autre dévoués aux idéaux d’identité déterminable qui les rend vulnérable aux opérateurs qui discernent et exploitent les points inévitables d’incohérence et de contradiction. L’essai se conclut par l’analyse de la notion de comédie que Serres définit comme un jeu entre la cohérence et l’incohérence, l’individuation et la désindividuation, un état fragmentaire triste et brisé, (comme dans l’Aristophane de Platon) mais aussi l’incarnation générative d’une conscience critique comique supplémentaire.
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 26:1, 2021
This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Slee... more This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Sleep is shown to be important for our understanding of Sloterdijk’s project as an index of his subject’s larger, hidden complex of inertias, habits, and corporeal requirements and processes that dominate subjective life and that exist outside the mastery of ego and consciousness. The essay explores this thesis by considering a series of figures that appear in Sloterdijk’s writings and interviews: the philosopher Heraclitus with his dismissive remarks on sleep, the insomniac Emil Cioran, the sleepwalker in Romantic thought. As the essay develops, it shows how, given such a subject formation, anthropotechnics is properly conceived as a management of the subject’s automatic processes to trick or repurpose or redirect them to work in concert or coincidence with the anthropotechnical project, rather than against it.
differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 29.3 (2018): 33-57., 2018
This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her k... more This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her key trope of home. Thus, it elaborates her critique of a certain closed “homely” formation of man’s subjectivity and it advances her thesis that woman might function as the salutary advent of the other sex, unhousing man, exposing his subjectivity as not-whole and sheltering him in a more open and unhomely existential home. The first section outlines man’s efforts to carve form and thought from primordial flux and to establish a world and home defined by discrete objects. However, as the second section shows, man goes too far, enveloping himself in fantasies that maladaptively deny the incompletion of human existence. Man would do better, Irigaray argues, to grant the universe its living sense of becoming. The final section reads Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in Homer’s Odyssey to elaborate upon Irigaray’s privileging of woman as home.
Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 42.1, Nov 2014
Stiegler’s philosophy poses a contest between two opposing forces in subjective life. On one side... more Stiegler’s philosophy poses a contest between two opposing forces in subjective life. On one side, the tendencies of a consumerist, hypermediated world produce a subject whose existential pursuit of satisfaction conforms to market offerings and to the near-instantaneous temporality of the internet. Stiegler worries that this instantaneity enervates the affect and libidinal investments of the subject to produce an exhaustion of desire, a debility of love, and a cascade of unhappy effects throughout political and spiritual life. Against these tendencies, Stiegler poses the force of love as the binding, narcissistic force of consciousness itself. Love suffers a present insufficiency, aims at a future fulfillment, and thereby sustains the future as a future of possibility and desire. Love thus fundamentally appears in Stiegler’s philosophy as narcissistic éros. With philía, a sublimation of éros, the ideal coherence one desires for one’s future broadens from the self to one’s City’s ideal becoming. Philía gives a more political context—the We, the City—for generating individuation out of essential self-love. The philosopher, loving wisdom, quests to refine his or her faculty of loving no less than seeking wisdom in relation to the ideal becoming of the City. The figure of the engaged amateur offers a less explicitly philosophical image of a lover whose devotion to an object individuates the self and cultivates the individuation of the community. Altogether, the essay highlights individuation as the key concern for Stiegler’s philosophy and describes how Stiegler develops the stakes of individuation in terms of éros and philía.
Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture 22.1-2, Jul 2013
With special attention to landscape art, this overview explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetics in fi... more With special attention to landscape art, this overview explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetics in five theses: (1) The event of art involves shedding the everyday significations and conceptual framings that shut out the world and enclose the subject in solipsism, (2) Art locates the subject in the presentness of a singular sensuous event, (3) Art arouses intimations of the ground of the image as a ground of unpresented chaos, wildness, and indifference, (4) Art stages a real encounter with the world’s unsignifying indifference to human existence, and (5) Art exposes the subject as other to itself in the event of art.
The essay opens with a general consideration of art and ethics in Badiou’s philosophy in order to... more The essay opens with a general consideration of art and ethics in Badiou’s philosophy in order to describe his subject as faithful to an event that pierces a given situation with its hitherto indiscernible truth. The essay then establishes connections between Badiou's work on the void of the situation, the hole of truth, and the rivenness of the subject, and Lacan’s work on trauma and the real. This connection is seen in Badiou’s description of truth as a radical alterity befalling the subject and constituting a real hole in the existing order of language. The subject remains ethically faithful to a truth by introducing it into the language of the situation in which that truth appears. Because the existing situation cannot articulate a truth radically novel and alterior to itself, the subject must “poeticize” in order to name any truth, as this essay shows, whether artistic, amorous, political, or scientific. By describing Badiou’s subject of art in terms of trauma, Badiou’s theory of art is placed in relation with that of the Romantics, who also conceived of art as addressed to an essential hole in being. By describing Badiou’s ethical subject in terms of trauma, the essay places Badiou’s ethics in relation to Levinas’s. The extent and limits of this comparison clarify Badiou’s critique of Levinas, which is less general than commonly supposed, and help to intervene in potential misreadings of Badiou’s own work, which resists the pathos and horror typically attached to ethical considerations of trauma and the real.
This reading of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) shows how literature works o... more This reading of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) shows how literature works outside of referential concerns; it concludes by considering ethics in the uncanny. At the legend’s core lies the question of Ichabod’s disappearance: does it represent a prank by a romantic rival or the predations of an actual headless horseman? This question draws its unsettling power, as I show, from Sleepy Hollow’s history on the front lines of the revolutionary war. The storytelling around Ichabod’s vanishing thus serves as a proxy for the dire, uncanny question: what’s the difference between those who survived the trauma of the war (like Ichabod’s neighbors) and those whose bodies and lives were shattered by that event (like the headless soldier)? The conclusion follows Freud’s hint that uncanny reminds one of a debt to be paid and proposes an ethical obligation to speak, to bear witness, and to pay in words on an obscure debt.
Page 1. AFTER LACAN Clinical Practice and e Subject of the Unconscious Edited and with an Introdu... more Page 1. AFTER LACAN Clinical Practice and e Subject of the Unconscious Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone Page 2. Page 3. After Lacan This One Page 4. SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Henry Sussman, series editor Page ...
Author: Laurent de Sutter. Translated by Robert Hughes. Excerpt from the forthcoming book, Superw... more Author: Laurent de Sutter. Translated by Robert Hughes. Excerpt from the forthcoming book, Superweak (Polity Press, 2025).
Excerpt not available electronically, but available in print: Paletten Nr. 335-336 (April 2024): 69-74.
Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry: Overview, 2023
Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Title: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020)
Translati... more Author: Peter Sloterdijk Title: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020) Translation: Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry (Polity Books, 2023) Translated by Robert Hughes
Overview by Robert Hughes
Sloterdijk’s book considers different ways that, over the past three thousand years, the West has imagined the engagement of otherworldly powers in the life of religious cultures. Sloterdijk’s question: what are the techniques and the conditions of plausibility that allow such constructs to bring divinity before human perception? When these elaborations encounter a historical demand for revision, how might one conceptualize the terms of that revision? How, in other words, are the heavens made to speak? And then made to speak again and again through the centuries?
Sloterdijk’s analyses draw from a broad range of sources. The stage-machinery of Athens offered the numinous presence of the divine by way of its sublimely masked representative floating over the stage. The Egyptian pharaoh was a figure at once human and divine, as if divinity condescended to present itself in the flesh and speak on its own behalf. And, of course, there are the “religions of the book,” in which the divine is held to be present through scripture. Sloterdijk is curious about the figural and rhetorical management of plausibility and implausibility for practitioners, the faithful, and prospective converts.
Sloterdijk observes that many religions are initially a practical matter: observance of precise cultic rites aim to secure for a people the patronage of a powerful otherworldly protector. Over the course of history, religion came to present itself as a something quite different, however: a set of propositions transcendentally true. One signal event was the configuration of Christian thought as the encounter of Semitic inheritances with Greek philosophy, such that theology was driven to logically rationalize an existing and dynamic tradition of thinking about the otherworldly.
The second signal event was the rise of a modern context for religion in the West. Under the monopoly conditions of the Catholic Church, religion had been able to enforce an orthodoxy and thereby limit the wayward impulses of its adherents. With the Protestant break, however, the Western religious “marketplace” came to pose a challenge for any church seeking to impose dogmatic prescriptions. Churchgoers asserted their demands and religion migrated into a kind of aesthetic event radically separate from the theology and orthodoxy of churches. If one of Sloterdijk’s key questions is implied by his title – how are the gods made to speak? – then, with the modern break, the terms of their speaking came to be ever less mediated by the certifications of religious authority and ever more located in the cultivation of a private sensibility and taste for the infinite.
In Sloterdijk’s view, religion in the West is perhaps finally right-sizing itself after all these millennia. If religion had formerly been saddled with a practically limitless portfolio, the social democracies of the West have dispersed many of its roles into secular agencies. What remains to religion suits its competencies far better: the domestication of contingency, the shaping of mortality, and a comprehensive aid to the interpretation of existence in the context of its finitude and its need for happiness.
This essay by Peter Sloterdijk (translated by Robert Hughes, 2021) is taken from his book We... more This essay by Peter Sloterdijk (translated by Robert Hughes, 2021) is taken from his book Weltfremdheit (1993). It opens with a phenomenological rumination on awakening: the dawning of thought and perception pulls the resisting subject out of its morass of sleep, “bringing me back to me.”
Sloterdijk posits a communal wakeful watchfulness as the founding condition of civilization’s support for thinking beyond mere survival. When culture metaphysicalized this sentinel function in a new conception of divine surveillance, the entirety of the world became conceivable as thoroughly penetrable by vision and subject to knowledge.
Sloterdijk discusses three civilizations that posited the world as thoroughgoingly susceptible to vision and requiring wakeful watchfulness for its defense: Heraclitus’s Greek polis called upon a coalition of human perception and judgment to defend against the idiocy of night and dream; Zoroaster’s Iranian empire posited the world as cosmic struggle requiring bright, sober thinkers to join their lord against furious confusion; and Isaiah’s Hebrew civilization raised the stakes of theological surveillance in the precarious context of God’s election of the saved.
Metaphysics and modernity have come to functionalize the dark within a positivist frame, refusing the rhythm of coming and going, asserting an everlasting assembly of the whole, positing an absence of absence. In truth, the world itself and we ourselves come forth through rhythms of waking and sleeping. The appearance of the world is conditioned upon these hiatuses and we impoverish it when we foreclose the discrete nothings of its nocturnal aspect.
The age of planetary co-existence calls for a new evolution in the wakeful watchfulness of a world undergoing inexorable devastation.
Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 2014
This prescient 1986 essay by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2014) explores proble... more This prescient 1986 essay by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2014) explores problems of temporality across different technological modalities of art writing (literal, analog, digital). Three examples outline important dimensions of the problem: (a) in Charlie Parker’s training, the analog writing of jazz to disc offers a recorded solo each time identical to its studio original, yet this inscription is deferred into new contexts and times; (b) in Matta’s video art, with its history of decisions improbably made, technical reproducibility is an essential and primary feature of works of art that suggests how the technological modality of the work bears upon the historical mobilization of memory and the time of history; (c) Queneau’s Blue Flowers opens the question of the human relation to time, with the massive elimination of delay and différance in “real-time” media: if the deferral, delay, and difference inherent to technical redoubling open a space for autonomy and isonomy, new technological conditions of reproducibility may threaten these programs of the improbable and unheard-of. Historically, writing suspends ethnic determinations in favor of a political community grounded in the open interpretability of its written laws. But, where the reflexivity of writing refers to historical temporality and its deferred time, analog and digital reflexivities correspond to real time. Real-time may tend to eliminate delay and thus threaten history and memory, and yet one observes that real time is only one aspect of technoscience. Technoscience also puts things in reserve and thus poses new access to memory, new possibilities for manipulating one’s heritage, and new possibilities for interpretation and differentiation.
Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy (Arne De Boever, ed.), Feb 2017
In my third and final lecture, I [Bernard Stiegler] consider the conflict opposing Denis Diderot ... more In my third and final lecture, I [Bernard Stiegler] consider the conflict opposing Denis Diderot to Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus, on the faculty of judging works. The contemporary critic Jean-Louis Jam has called this conflict “the quarrel of the amateur.” I examine how this conflict anticipates from the eighteenth century, but in a kind of reversal in advance, the ambiguous fate in which criticism decomposes into philistinism—and in which the cultivated philistine comes to be interested and circumspect, and to repeat, with a serious, portentous air, “This is interesting … this is interesting.” With Diderot and the Encyclopédie, the Amateur becomes a figure on which there weighs a suspicion that imposes itself first insofar as the amateur represents a privilege typical of the ancien régime. But it also weighs on the amatorat, the bourgeois class of amateurs, as we shall see with Roland Barthes, and precisely as this bourgeois class, as an amatorat that is both philistine and cultivated. As for us, the hermeneuts of the twenty-first century, all more or less philistinized perhaps, mystagogues, mystifiers, and mystified, no longer believing in either myths or their demystification, we know now that we have come to know a new, quite uncultivated philistinism, though believing itself quite cultivated, and rather worse than that of all those bourgeois: a philistinism proper to our own time, a “bobo” philistinism, getting its honey from the buzz. Translated by Robert Hughes, 2017
ars industrialis: association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l'esprit, 2015
http://www.arsindustrialis.org/vocabulary-english-version
Short essays by Bernard Stiegler on ke... more http://www.arsindustrialis.org/vocabulary-english-version Short essays by Bernard Stiegler on key terms in his philosophy (translated by Robert Hughes, 2015).
Follow the URL link above to arsindustrialis.org to explore the following:
Pharmakon, pharmacology
Prostheticity
Technics of the self
Technics of the Mind and Spirit
Relational technologies
Technoscience
Organology
Hypomnēmata
Subsist, Exist, Consist
Anamnēsis, hypomnēsis (Memory)
ars industrialis: association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l'esprit, 2013
http://arsindustrialis.org/amateur-english-version
700-word entry on the theme of the amateur, w... more http://arsindustrialis.org/amateur-english-version 700-word entry on the theme of the amateur, written by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2013). Kindly follow the link on this page to the arsindustrialis site for the free paper.
This monograph argues for the importance and fecundity of thinking through the phenomenon of the ... more This monograph argues for the importance and fecundity of thinking through the phenomenon of the body-thought – as in the event of art, when the subject’s body registers the sense of a work, even as cognitive sense-making proves inadequate. It argues for an understanding of the subject as characterized by its existential betweenitude: split between body- and cognitive-thought, between the world in its sensuous immediacy and the world as rendered meaningful by reflection, between our longing for the shelter of a ‘safe haven’ and the anxious reality of our uncanny displacements. Other theses theorize the body by highlighting the specific role of visuality in the figuration, formation, and deformation of body-thought. These theses together argue that the aesthetic encounter produces affect by exciting a destabilization of our image-grounded subjective coherence.
This study examines three works of early American fiction—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Washi... more This study examines three works of early American fiction—Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun—as they bring the resources of literary writing to bear on the fundamental difficulties of thinking about ethics. Each of these narratives, as I show, dramatizes a curious problem of witnessing. Thus, in the revolutionary reverberations of Sleepy Hollow, in the uncanny appearance of its headless horseman, and in the unsettling disappearance of its village schoolmaster, this project finds the force of an enigmatic ethical imperative: an obligation to bear witness to an event by putting it properly into language, but also the confounding impossibility of determining the precise nature of that event. Something analogous is at work in the other two literary texts as well: out of an overwhelming encounter with death, we find not only a certain impasse of expression and understanding, but also a powerful ethical obligation to speak and to tell a tale.
To further develop the theoretical stakes of these literary readings, the book also examines the work of four twentieth-century continental thinkers, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou, who, in psychoanalysis and philosophy, renewed the effort to think about a non-cognitive dimension of ethics. Moreover, as this book argues, each in their various ways proposed aesthetics or art as an approach to this dimension. Thus, it is shown that literature, as a mode of expression that draws its force from a certain relation to the incomprehensible, the unknown, or the unconscious, is able to open up that part of ethics that has resisted more traditional philosophy.
The unique contribution of this book, as a comparativist analysis of American literature, is to bring nineteenth-century American literature into contact with the continental tradition in aesthetics. By situating early American fictions as participants within a larger discourse about art and ethics, this book thereby broadens the possibilities for understanding these texts beyond their traditional historicist confines, and does so without denying the importance of history. And, as a theoretical meditation on the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, this book claims importance for the way it describes a hitherto obscured trend in continental thought to argue that this intersection of ethics and aesthetics is both necessary and inevitable. Finally, this project points to an overlooked common lineage, descending from German Romanticism, between American Romanticism and contemporary continental thought: a shared supposition about the limits of reason as a mode of presenting the essence of art and ethics and a shared faith in the promise of literature to speak to, or open up this subjective space of foundational ethics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1
Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
In Lieu of a Historical Introduction
Chapter 1: Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History 13
Rhythmic Beauty and Dreamy Charm: Memory, History, and the Pleasurable Tale
Sleepy Hollow and the Nightmare of History
Fearful Pleasures: From Trauma to the Uncanny
Postscript: The Moral of the Story and What it Goes to Prove
Chapter 2: Lacan and the Beyond of Language: From Art to Ethics 39
The Work of Art, the Emptiness of the Signifier, the Representation of the Thing
The Head of Beatrice: The Mystery of the Beautiful and the Limit of Death
Ethics: From the Vicissitudes of Being to the Passion of the Signifier
Chapter 3: Brown’s Wieland and the Ethical Circumscription of Death 61
Literary Morality and the Romance of Family Murder
The Presence of the Divine Word and the Movement of the Signifier
The Unforsaken Image
Writing out of Death
Chapter 4: Heideggerian Ethics: The Voice of Art and the Call to Being 85
Language, Poetry, and the Unconcealment of Being
Heidegger’s Van Gogh: The Shoes That Stared, the Painting That Spoke
The Call of Language and the Obligation to Bear Witness to One’s Existence
Not at Home: Heidegger and the Ethical Uncanny
Chapter 5: Levinas: Art and the Transcendence of Solitude 113
Art and the Grammar of Being
Aesthetics, Vulnerability, and Proximity to the Other
Saying the Word and Seeking the Other in the Poem
Irresistible: The Event of Art and the Call for an Ethical Criticism
Chapter 6: Endings: Ethics, Enigma, and Address in The Marble Faun 137
Hawthorne’s Final Romance
Time, the Eternal City, and the Disadvantage of History for Life
The End of the Romance, the Death of the Reader, and the Impossible Address
Chapter 7: Riven: Badiou’s Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma 159
The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject
A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess
Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics
This outstanding collection of papers by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin is re... more This outstanding collection of papers by Willy Apollon, Danielle Bergeron, and Lucie Cantin is remarkable for its careful attention to the relationship between Lacanian concepts and their function within a clinical setting. The case material in this collection is abundant—not merely illustrative or anecdotal, but truly integral to the evolution and presentation of the Lacanian ideas that guide them. The emphasis on the signifier as it marks a particular subjective movement with the psychoanalytic treatment is, therefore, vividly presented, both in its concrete particularity and in all of its theoretical richness. The specifically clinical orientation of these papers marks this collection as an especially important contribution for a number of English-speaking audiences. Firstly, it grounds Lacanian concepts within the context of their origination. Ideas that may become overly abstract, from the “phallus” to the “Imaginary,” are given depth by reference to the Clinic. Secondly, such presentations open Lacanian concepts to a clinical audience, an audience perhaps professionally indifferent to Lacanian applications in philosophy, gender studies, or literary theory.
Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin, as founders of the École freudienne du Québec and the Gifric group have long been involved in political, academic, and clinical activities and have, moreover, developed a vital and well-respected clinical practice within Quebec. Gifric is especially well known for its innovative work with young adult psychotics, although the psychoanalytic practice of this group is wide ranging, as this collection will also attest. Although the authors have presented and published widely in North America and are active in a number of psychoanalytic organizations, there is no currently existing collection in English that presents their careful and innovative work. This book represents just such a collection.
The papers may be understood as addressing four areas of interest to academic Lacanians and to English-speaking psychoanalysts seriously interested in Lacan. The early chapters are devoted to the general concepts (for example, the jouissance of the Other, the sexual division, and the paternal function) and key terms (dream, signifier, and interpretation) that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The next chapters focus on the groundbreaking clinic of psychosis that Gifric has pioneered in Québec—how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. The next chapters turn toward the second phase of analytic treatment, introducing a new set of terms—the letter of the body, the symptom, the fantasy—to understand the genesis within the transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject’s assumption of the Other’s lack. The concluding chapters are especially rich in clinical material, and broaden the understanding of the analytic clinic by discussing the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: obsessional and hysterical neurosis, perversion, and (again) psychosis.
The volume is co-edited and introduced by Robert Hughes and Kareen Malone, an academic in the humanities and a psychologist. These two differing perspectives attempt to balance a certain tension in the reception of Lacan—namely, the inappropriate division between his theoretical elaborations and their clinical instantiation. It is the implicit argument of all the chapters, and is explicitly argued in the Introduction, that the crucial event of Lacan’s teaching and theoretical articulation follows from the clinical encounter, and that this encounter remains the core of any truly Lacanian theoretical elaboration, whether explicitly or implicitly. Although there are a number of rigorous theoretical accounts of Lacan, an indescribably important dimension is lost when any such account does not consider the clinical referent of so many of Lacan’s ideas. The clinical practice of psychoanalysis is the experiment with the unconscious, begun by Freud, that Lacan sought to deepen and formalize. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious returns us to that experiment.
The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society called this “an important book that must interest anyone concerned with the practical import of Lacan’s work, but also anyone drawn to Lacanian theory.” The Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association writes “If After Lacan had simply explicated Lacanian concepts and animated them with clinical vignettes, it would have accomplished a great deal. But clearly this volume is more than that. It reshapes the psychoanalytic landscape…"
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Dialectic of Theory and Clinic. Hughes and Malone 1. Some questions in the Lacanian field and the work of Gifric 2. Academic interest in the Lacanian clinic 3. Clinical interest in Lacanian theory 4. Broader debates 5. General summary of chapters 6. Limited Glossary of Terms 7. Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The Trauma of Language. Cantin 1. Human beings as a product of language 2. Language makes real jouissance impossible 3. The introduction of an other jouissance and the paternal function 4. The case of Myriam
Chapter 2: The Jouissance of the Other and the Sexual Division in Psychoanalysis. Apollon 1. Individual satisfaction and the jouissance of the Other 2. The sexual division: procreation, jouissance, and the ethics of masculinity 3. The sexual division: feminine jouissance beyond the phallic 4. Castration: the inadequacy of the Other and the insufficiency of the word
Chapter 3: The Signifier. Bergeron 1. The signifier: a structure behind the scenes 2. The signifier of analytic discourse as a rupture in meaning 3. The navel of the dream: a hole in meaning where jouissance returns 4. Eve of Destruction: the signifier as metaphor of the subject and metonymy of desire
Chapter 4: The Work of the Dream and Jouissance in Treatment of the Psychotic. Bergeron 1. The tyranny of the jouissance of the Other and the absence of the symbolic father 2. Symbolic frame for treatment: delusion to dream, knowledge to ignorance, object to subject 3. The dream as staging the structure of the subject's relation to the Other 4. Bandages on the knees: the dream, the chain of signifiers, and the unrepresented 5. Dreams of the hand: bringing the symptom to pierce the delusion
Chapter 5: From Delusion to Dream. Cantin 1. Dreams treat the real with something symbolic 2. The function of delusion in psychosis: the case of Mr. Owens 3. Introducing dream work in place of the workings of delusion: the case of Mr. T.
Chapter 6: The Letter of the Body. Apollon 1. Transference and the trauma of language: the subject, jouissance, and the signifier 2. The parceled body as a writing of jouissance by the agency of the letter 3. The clinic of the symptom and the ethical action of analysis
Chapter 7: The Symptom. Apollon 1. Jouissance, the object, and the problem of satisfaction 2. Symptom as an inscription and division of jouissance: an anorexic in love 3. The passage to the fantasy as a structuration of leftover jouissance 4. The traversal of the fantasy
Chapter 8: From Symptom to Fantasy. Apollon 1. Marguerite’s dreams: the symptom as a writing of fatal jouissance 2. The clinic of the symptom, or the Freudian passage from symptom to fantasy 3. The Master and Marguerite: the Lacanian clinic and the working through of fantasy
Chapter 9: Perverse Features and the Future of the Drive in Obsessional Neurosis. Bergeron 1. The case of Mr. Beauregard 2. Childhood identifications: ego ideal, ideal ego, and the movement of desire 3. The obsessional, as the imaginary phallus of the mother, looking for the father 4. Perverse features in the obsessional's family and the acting out of fantasy 5. Passage from seduction to castration and the ethical act of the obsessional’s analysis
Chapter 10: Perversion and Hysteria. Cantin 1. The choice and solution of the subject in perversion: jouissance, signifier, and the Other 2. The clinical experience of perversion: the case of Mr. Buckold 3. The hysteric with the pervert
Chapter 11: The Fate of Jouissance in the Pervert-Hysteric Couple. Cantin 1. The drive as an effect of language 2. Seduction as refuge from castration: the letter of the body, the insufficiency of the signifier 3. The pervert's response to the hysteric 4. The pervert and the effect of the signifier 5. The contract and the eradication of the Other 6. Desire leads back to the drive 7. Violence and aggressivity: the violence of the demonstration
Chapter 12: Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword. Bergeron 1. Violence in works of art 2. Mishima's specific violence 3. The production of the Thing in language 4. The "letters of the body" and the return of das Ding 5. The failure of masculine identification 6. The unveiling of the original fantasy 7. From the pen to the sword: the quest for the phallus and for a meaning to his death
This essay reads a short narrative, “Savoir” by Hélène Cixous, to describe susceptibility as a pr... more This essay reads a short narrative, “Savoir” by Hélène Cixous, to describe susceptibility as a problem organized around two lines of impingement: between subject and world and between consciousness and the wayward impulses of interior life. The young girl in Cixous’s text suffers a moment of disorientation and distress one misty morning and, against presumptions of inviolability and ideals of subjective consistency, this unhappy event comes to resonate with her disappointed trust in the generosity of the world, her anxious sense of betrayal with respect to those who ought to protect her and her insecurity about her own role in this complex of associations. The frame of susceptibility thus opens up a space for Cixous’s reader and this essay to think the subject in her inconsistency and self-strangeness.
ABSTRACT
In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocri... more ABSTRACT
In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocrisy in a non-moral sense. Ruminating upon the example of Molière’s Tartuffe, Serres takes up the scandalous imposture of the hypocrite and he shows, at the heart of comic pretence, what this essay describes as an underdetermination of identity and individuation. That is, where readers, theatregoers, and participants in public discourse would ground thought upon a principle of determinacy and individuation—for example determinations of the basic wickedness of hypocrites and parasites—philosophical considerations of these figures (and the phenomenon of comic action) explode this principle to suggest an ontological and discursive space of inconsistency and intermediacy. By examining Tartuffe’s ingratiating language of piety and the play’s surprising figures of grace, this essay shows how discursive systems and social systems are equally devoted to ideals of determinable identity that leave them vulnerable to operators who can discern and exploit the inevitable sites of latent incoherence and inconsistency. The essay concludes by developing Serres’s notions of comedy as a play between consistency and inconsistency, individuation and disindividuation, a sad and severed fragmentariness (as with Plato’s Aristophanes), but also the generative spawning of a supplemental comic critical consciousness.
Résumé
Dans Le Parasite (1980), le philosophe Michel Serres invite le lecteur à penser l’hypocrisie de manière non-morale. En méditant l’exemple du Tartuffe de Molière, Serres se saisit de l’imposture scandaleuse de l’hypocrite et révèle, au cœur de toute prétention comique, ce que cet essai décrit comme une sous-détermination de l’identité et de l’individuation. C’est-à-dire, là où le lecteur, spectateur et participant du discours public fonderaient la pensée sur un principe de détermination et d’individuation – par exemple la détermination de la méchanceté fondamentale de l’hypocrite et du parasite – les considérations philosophiques de ces figures (et le phénomène de l’action comique) font exploser ce principe au profit de la suggestion d’un espace discursif et ontologique incohérent et intermédiaire. En examinant le langage de piété de Tartuffe et la figure surprenante de la grâce, cet essai montre la manière dont les systèmes discursifs et sociaux sont autant l’un que l’autre dévoués aux idéaux d’identité déterminable qui les rend vulnérable aux opérateurs qui discernent et exploitent les points inévitables d’incohérence et de contradiction. L’essai se conclut par l’analyse de la notion de comédie que Serres définit comme un jeu entre la cohérence et l’incohérence, l’individuation et la désindividuation, un état fragmentaire triste et brisé, (comme dans l’Aristophane de Platon) mais aussi l’incarnation générative d’une conscience critique comique supplémentaire.
Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 26:1, 2021
This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Slee... more This essay explores the trope of sleep in Peter Sloterdijk’s philosophy of anthropotechnics. Sleep is shown to be important for our understanding of Sloterdijk’s project as an index of his subject’s larger, hidden complex of inertias, habits, and corporeal requirements and processes that dominate subjective life and that exist outside the mastery of ego and consciousness. The essay explores this thesis by considering a series of figures that appear in Sloterdijk’s writings and interviews: the philosopher Heraclitus with his dismissive remarks on sleep, the insomniac Emil Cioran, the sleepwalker in Romantic thought. As the essay develops, it shows how, given such a subject formation, anthropotechnics is properly conceived as a management of the subject’s automatic processes to trick or repurpose or redirect them to work in concert or coincidence with the anthropotechnical project, rather than against it.
differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 29.3 (2018): 33-57., 2018
This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her k... more This essay illuminates the recent philosophy of Luce Irigaray by following how she develops her key trope of home. Thus, it elaborates her critique of a certain closed “homely” formation of man’s subjectivity and it advances her thesis that woman might function as the salutary advent of the other sex, unhousing man, exposing his subjectivity as not-whole and sheltering him in a more open and unhomely existential home. The first section outlines man’s efforts to carve form and thought from primordial flux and to establish a world and home defined by discrete objects. However, as the second section shows, man goes too far, enveloping himself in fantasies that maladaptively deny the incompletion of human existence. Man would do better, Irigaray argues, to grant the universe its living sense of becoming. The final section reads Odysseus and Penelope’s reunion in Homer’s Odyssey to elaborate upon Irigaray’s privileging of woman as home.
Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 42.1, Nov 2014
Stiegler’s philosophy poses a contest between two opposing forces in subjective life. On one side... more Stiegler’s philosophy poses a contest between two opposing forces in subjective life. On one side, the tendencies of a consumerist, hypermediated world produce a subject whose existential pursuit of satisfaction conforms to market offerings and to the near-instantaneous temporality of the internet. Stiegler worries that this instantaneity enervates the affect and libidinal investments of the subject to produce an exhaustion of desire, a debility of love, and a cascade of unhappy effects throughout political and spiritual life. Against these tendencies, Stiegler poses the force of love as the binding, narcissistic force of consciousness itself. Love suffers a present insufficiency, aims at a future fulfillment, and thereby sustains the future as a future of possibility and desire. Love thus fundamentally appears in Stiegler’s philosophy as narcissistic éros. With philía, a sublimation of éros, the ideal coherence one desires for one’s future broadens from the self to one’s City’s ideal becoming. Philía gives a more political context—the We, the City—for generating individuation out of essential self-love. The philosopher, loving wisdom, quests to refine his or her faculty of loving no less than seeking wisdom in relation to the ideal becoming of the City. The figure of the engaged amateur offers a less explicitly philosophical image of a lover whose devotion to an object individuates the self and cultivates the individuation of the community. Altogether, the essay highlights individuation as the key concern for Stiegler’s philosophy and describes how Stiegler develops the stakes of individuation in terms of éros and philía.
Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture 22.1-2, Jul 2013
With special attention to landscape art, this overview explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetics in fi... more With special attention to landscape art, this overview explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetics in five theses: (1) The event of art involves shedding the everyday significations and conceptual framings that shut out the world and enclose the subject in solipsism, (2) Art locates the subject in the presentness of a singular sensuous event, (3) Art arouses intimations of the ground of the image as a ground of unpresented chaos, wildness, and indifference, (4) Art stages a real encounter with the world’s unsignifying indifference to human existence, and (5) Art exposes the subject as other to itself in the event of art.
The essay opens with a general consideration of art and ethics in Badiou’s philosophy in order to... more The essay opens with a general consideration of art and ethics in Badiou’s philosophy in order to describe his subject as faithful to an event that pierces a given situation with its hitherto indiscernible truth. The essay then establishes connections between Badiou's work on the void of the situation, the hole of truth, and the rivenness of the subject, and Lacan’s work on trauma and the real. This connection is seen in Badiou’s description of truth as a radical alterity befalling the subject and constituting a real hole in the existing order of language. The subject remains ethically faithful to a truth by introducing it into the language of the situation in which that truth appears. Because the existing situation cannot articulate a truth radically novel and alterior to itself, the subject must “poeticize” in order to name any truth, as this essay shows, whether artistic, amorous, political, or scientific. By describing Badiou’s subject of art in terms of trauma, Badiou’s theory of art is placed in relation with that of the Romantics, who also conceived of art as addressed to an essential hole in being. By describing Badiou’s ethical subject in terms of trauma, the essay places Badiou’s ethics in relation to Levinas’s. The extent and limits of this comparison clarify Badiou’s critique of Levinas, which is less general than commonly supposed, and help to intervene in potential misreadings of Badiou’s own work, which resists the pathos and horror typically attached to ethical considerations of trauma and the real.
This reading of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) shows how literature works o... more This reading of Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820) shows how literature works outside of referential concerns; it concludes by considering ethics in the uncanny. At the legend’s core lies the question of Ichabod’s disappearance: does it represent a prank by a romantic rival or the predations of an actual headless horseman? This question draws its unsettling power, as I show, from Sleepy Hollow’s history on the front lines of the revolutionary war. The storytelling around Ichabod’s vanishing thus serves as a proxy for the dire, uncanny question: what’s the difference between those who survived the trauma of the war (like Ichabod’s neighbors) and those whose bodies and lives were shattered by that event (like the headless soldier)? The conclusion follows Freud’s hint that uncanny reminds one of a debt to be paid and proposes an ethical obligation to speak, to bear witness, and to pay in words on an obscure debt.
Page 1. AFTER LACAN Clinical Practice and e Subject of the Unconscious Edited and with an Introdu... more Page 1. AFTER LACAN Clinical Practice and e Subject of the Unconscious Edited and with an Introduction by Robert Hughes and Kareen Ror Malone Page 2. Page 3. After Lacan This One Page 4. SUNY series in Psychoanalysis and Culture Henry Sussman, series editor Page ...
Author: Laurent de Sutter. Translated by Robert Hughes. Excerpt from the forthcoming book, Superw... more Author: Laurent de Sutter. Translated by Robert Hughes. Excerpt from the forthcoming book, Superweak (Polity Press, 2025).
Excerpt not available electronically, but available in print: Paletten Nr. 335-336 (April 2024): 69-74.
Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry: Overview, 2023
Author: Peter Sloterdijk
Title: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020)
Translati... more Author: Peter Sloterdijk Title: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020) Translation: Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry (Polity Books, 2023) Translated by Robert Hughes
Overview by Robert Hughes
Sloterdijk’s book considers different ways that, over the past three thousand years, the West has imagined the engagement of otherworldly powers in the life of religious cultures. Sloterdijk’s question: what are the techniques and the conditions of plausibility that allow such constructs to bring divinity before human perception? When these elaborations encounter a historical demand for revision, how might one conceptualize the terms of that revision? How, in other words, are the heavens made to speak? And then made to speak again and again through the centuries?
Sloterdijk’s analyses draw from a broad range of sources. The stage-machinery of Athens offered the numinous presence of the divine by way of its sublimely masked representative floating over the stage. The Egyptian pharaoh was a figure at once human and divine, as if divinity condescended to present itself in the flesh and speak on its own behalf. And, of course, there are the “religions of the book,” in which the divine is held to be present through scripture. Sloterdijk is curious about the figural and rhetorical management of plausibility and implausibility for practitioners, the faithful, and prospective converts.
Sloterdijk observes that many religions are initially a practical matter: observance of precise cultic rites aim to secure for a people the patronage of a powerful otherworldly protector. Over the course of history, religion came to present itself as a something quite different, however: a set of propositions transcendentally true. One signal event was the configuration of Christian thought as the encounter of Semitic inheritances with Greek philosophy, such that theology was driven to logically rationalize an existing and dynamic tradition of thinking about the otherworldly.
The second signal event was the rise of a modern context for religion in the West. Under the monopoly conditions of the Catholic Church, religion had been able to enforce an orthodoxy and thereby limit the wayward impulses of its adherents. With the Protestant break, however, the Western religious “marketplace” came to pose a challenge for any church seeking to impose dogmatic prescriptions. Churchgoers asserted their demands and religion migrated into a kind of aesthetic event radically separate from the theology and orthodoxy of churches. If one of Sloterdijk’s key questions is implied by his title – how are the gods made to speak? – then, with the modern break, the terms of their speaking came to be ever less mediated by the certifications of religious authority and ever more located in the cultivation of a private sensibility and taste for the infinite.
In Sloterdijk’s view, religion in the West is perhaps finally right-sizing itself after all these millennia. If religion had formerly been saddled with a practically limitless portfolio, the social democracies of the West have dispersed many of its roles into secular agencies. What remains to religion suits its competencies far better: the domestication of contingency, the shaping of mortality, and a comprehensive aid to the interpretation of existence in the context of its finitude and its need for happiness.
This essay by Peter Sloterdijk (translated by Robert Hughes, 2021) is taken from his book We... more This essay by Peter Sloterdijk (translated by Robert Hughes, 2021) is taken from his book Weltfremdheit (1993). It opens with a phenomenological rumination on awakening: the dawning of thought and perception pulls the resisting subject out of its morass of sleep, “bringing me back to me.”
Sloterdijk posits a communal wakeful watchfulness as the founding condition of civilization’s support for thinking beyond mere survival. When culture metaphysicalized this sentinel function in a new conception of divine surveillance, the entirety of the world became conceivable as thoroughly penetrable by vision and subject to knowledge.
Sloterdijk discusses three civilizations that posited the world as thoroughgoingly susceptible to vision and requiring wakeful watchfulness for its defense: Heraclitus’s Greek polis called upon a coalition of human perception and judgment to defend against the idiocy of night and dream; Zoroaster’s Iranian empire posited the world as cosmic struggle requiring bright, sober thinkers to join their lord against furious confusion; and Isaiah’s Hebrew civilization raised the stakes of theological surveillance in the precarious context of God’s election of the saved.
Metaphysics and modernity have come to functionalize the dark within a positivist frame, refusing the rhythm of coming and going, asserting an everlasting assembly of the whole, positing an absence of absence. In truth, the world itself and we ourselves come forth through rhythms of waking and sleeping. The appearance of the world is conditioned upon these hiatuses and we impoverish it when we foreclose the discrete nothings of its nocturnal aspect.
The age of planetary co-existence calls for a new evolution in the wakeful watchfulness of a world undergoing inexorable devastation.
Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, 2014
This prescient 1986 essay by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2014) explores proble... more This prescient 1986 essay by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2014) explores problems of temporality across different technological modalities of art writing (literal, analog, digital). Three examples outline important dimensions of the problem: (a) in Charlie Parker’s training, the analog writing of jazz to disc offers a recorded solo each time identical to its studio original, yet this inscription is deferred into new contexts and times; (b) in Matta’s video art, with its history of decisions improbably made, technical reproducibility is an essential and primary feature of works of art that suggests how the technological modality of the work bears upon the historical mobilization of memory and the time of history; (c) Queneau’s Blue Flowers opens the question of the human relation to time, with the massive elimination of delay and différance in “real-time” media: if the deferral, delay, and difference inherent to technical redoubling open a space for autonomy and isonomy, new technological conditions of reproducibility may threaten these programs of the improbable and unheard-of. Historically, writing suspends ethnic determinations in favor of a political community grounded in the open interpretability of its written laws. But, where the reflexivity of writing refers to historical temporality and its deferred time, analog and digital reflexivities correspond to real time. Real-time may tend to eliminate delay and thus threaten history and memory, and yet one observes that real time is only one aspect of technoscience. Technoscience also puts things in reserve and thus poses new access to memory, new possibilities for manipulating one’s heritage, and new possibilities for interpretation and differentiation.
Bernard Stiegler: Amateur Philosophy (Arne De Boever, ed.), Feb 2017
In my third and final lecture, I [Bernard Stiegler] consider the conflict opposing Denis Diderot ... more In my third and final lecture, I [Bernard Stiegler] consider the conflict opposing Denis Diderot to Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Count de Caylus, on the faculty of judging works. The contemporary critic Jean-Louis Jam has called this conflict “the quarrel of the amateur.” I examine how this conflict anticipates from the eighteenth century, but in a kind of reversal in advance, the ambiguous fate in which criticism decomposes into philistinism—and in which the cultivated philistine comes to be interested and circumspect, and to repeat, with a serious, portentous air, “This is interesting … this is interesting.” With Diderot and the Encyclopédie, the Amateur becomes a figure on which there weighs a suspicion that imposes itself first insofar as the amateur represents a privilege typical of the ancien régime. But it also weighs on the amatorat, the bourgeois class of amateurs, as we shall see with Roland Barthes, and precisely as this bourgeois class, as an amatorat that is both philistine and cultivated. As for us, the hermeneuts of the twenty-first century, all more or less philistinized perhaps, mystagogues, mystifiers, and mystified, no longer believing in either myths or their demystification, we know now that we have come to know a new, quite uncultivated philistinism, though believing itself quite cultivated, and rather worse than that of all those bourgeois: a philistinism proper to our own time, a “bobo” philistinism, getting its honey from the buzz. Translated by Robert Hughes, 2017
ars industrialis: association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l'esprit, 2015
http://www.arsindustrialis.org/vocabulary-english-version
Short essays by Bernard Stiegler on ke... more http://www.arsindustrialis.org/vocabulary-english-version Short essays by Bernard Stiegler on key terms in his philosophy (translated by Robert Hughes, 2015).
Follow the URL link above to arsindustrialis.org to explore the following:
Pharmakon, pharmacology
Prostheticity
Technics of the self
Technics of the Mind and Spirit
Relational technologies
Technoscience
Organology
Hypomnēmata
Subsist, Exist, Consist
Anamnēsis, hypomnēsis (Memory)
ars industrialis: association internationale pour une politique industrielle des technologies de l'esprit, 2013
http://arsindustrialis.org/amateur-english-version
700-word entry on the theme of the amateur, w... more http://arsindustrialis.org/amateur-english-version 700-word entry on the theme of the amateur, written by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2013). Kindly follow the link on this page to the arsindustrialis site for the free paper.
A 50-minute public talk for general audiences, made together with Professor Elizabeth Renker (OSU... more A 50-minute public talk for general audiences, made together with Professor Elizabeth Renker (OSU). Sponsored by the College of Arts & Sciences, Ohio State University. A 15-minute introduction by Professor Renker, followed by a 15-minute introduction by Robert Hughes, followed by Q&A moderated by Clara Davison. Captioned.
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Books by Robert Hughes
To further develop the theoretical stakes of these literary readings, the book also examines the work of four twentieth-century continental thinkers, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou, who, in psychoanalysis and philosophy, renewed the effort to think about a non-cognitive dimension of ethics. Moreover, as this book argues, each in their various ways proposed aesthetics or art as an approach to this dimension. Thus, it is shown that literature, as a mode of expression that draws its force from a certain relation to the incomprehensible, the unknown, or the unconscious, is able to open up that part of ethics that has resisted more traditional philosophy.
The unique contribution of this book, as a comparativist analysis of American literature, is to bring nineteenth-century American literature into contact with the continental tradition in aesthetics. By situating early American fictions as participants within a larger discourse about art and ethics, this book thereby broadens the possibilities for understanding these texts beyond their traditional historicist confines, and does so without denying the importance of history. And, as a theoretical meditation on the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, this book claims importance for the way it describes a hitherto obscured trend in continental thought to argue that this intersection of ethics and aesthetics is both necessary and inevitable. Finally, this project points to an overlooked common lineage, descending from German Romanticism, between American Romanticism and contemporary continental thought: a shared supposition about the limits of reason as a mode of presenting the essence of art and ethics and a shared faith in the promise of literature to speak to, or open up this subjective space of foundational ethics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1
Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
In Lieu of a Historical Introduction
Chapter 1: Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History 13
Rhythmic Beauty and Dreamy Charm: Memory, History, and the Pleasurable Tale
Sleepy Hollow and the Nightmare of History
Fearful Pleasures: From Trauma to the Uncanny
Postscript: The Moral of the Story and What it Goes to Prove
Chapter 2: Lacan and the Beyond of Language: From Art to Ethics 39
The Work of Art, the Emptiness of the Signifier, the Representation of the Thing
The Head of Beatrice: The Mystery of the Beautiful and the Limit of Death
Ethics: From the Vicissitudes of Being to the Passion of the Signifier
Chapter 3: Brown’s Wieland and the Ethical Circumscription of Death 61
Literary Morality and the Romance of Family Murder
The Presence of the Divine Word and the Movement of the Signifier
The Unforsaken Image
Writing out of Death
Chapter 4: Heideggerian Ethics: The Voice of Art and the Call to Being 85
Language, Poetry, and the Unconcealment of Being
Heidegger’s Van Gogh: The Shoes That Stared, the Painting That Spoke
The Call of Language and the Obligation to Bear Witness to One’s Existence
Not at Home: Heidegger and the Ethical Uncanny
Chapter 5: Levinas: Art and the Transcendence of Solitude 113
Art and the Grammar of Being
Aesthetics, Vulnerability, and Proximity to the Other
Saying the Word and Seeking the Other in the Poem
Irresistible: The Event of Art and the Call for an Ethical Criticism
Chapter 6: Endings: Ethics, Enigma, and Address in The Marble Faun 137
Hawthorne’s Final Romance
Time, the Eternal City, and the Disadvantage of History for Life
The End of the Romance, the Death of the Reader, and the Impossible Address
Chapter 7: Riven: Badiou’s Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma 159
The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject
A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess
Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics
Epilogue: Word after Word 185
Notes 189
Works Cited 215
Index 225
Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin, as founders of the École freudienne du Québec and the Gifric group have long been involved in political, academic, and clinical activities and have, moreover, developed a vital and well-respected clinical practice within Quebec. Gifric is especially well known for its innovative work with young adult psychotics, although the psychoanalytic practice of this group is wide ranging, as this collection will also attest. Although the authors have presented and published widely in North America and are active in a number of psychoanalytic organizations, there is no currently existing collection in English that presents their careful and innovative work. This book represents just such a collection.
The papers may be understood as addressing four areas of interest to academic Lacanians and to English-speaking psychoanalysts seriously interested in Lacan. The early chapters are devoted to the general concepts (for example, the jouissance of the Other, the sexual division, and the paternal function) and key terms (dream, signifier, and interpretation) that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The next chapters focus on the groundbreaking clinic of psychosis that Gifric has pioneered in Québec—how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. The next chapters turn toward the second phase of analytic treatment, introducing a new set of terms—the letter of the body, the symptom, the fantasy—to understand the genesis within the transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject’s assumption of the Other’s lack. The concluding chapters are especially rich in clinical material, and broaden the understanding of the analytic clinic by discussing the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: obsessional and hysterical neurosis, perversion, and (again) psychosis.
The volume is co-edited and introduced by Robert Hughes and Kareen Malone, an academic in the humanities and a psychologist. These two differing perspectives attempt to balance a certain tension in the reception of Lacan—namely, the inappropriate division between his theoretical elaborations and their clinical instantiation. It is the implicit argument of all the chapters, and is explicitly argued in the Introduction, that the crucial event of Lacan’s teaching and theoretical articulation follows from the clinical encounter, and that this encounter remains the core of any truly Lacanian theoretical elaboration, whether explicitly or implicitly. Although there are a number of rigorous theoretical accounts of Lacan, an indescribably important dimension is lost when any such account does not consider the clinical referent of so many of Lacan’s ideas. The clinical practice of psychoanalysis is the experiment with the unconscious, begun by Freud, that Lacan sought to deepen and formalize. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious returns us to that experiment.
The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society called this “an important book that must interest anyone concerned with the practical import of Lacan’s work, but also anyone drawn to Lacanian theory.” The Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association writes “If After Lacan had simply explicated Lacanian concepts and animated them with clinical vignettes, it would have accomplished a great deal. But clearly this volume is more than that. It reshapes the psychoanalytic landscape…"
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Dialectic of Theory and Clinic. Hughes and Malone
1. Some questions in the Lacanian field and the work of Gifric
2. Academic interest in the Lacanian clinic
3. Clinical interest in Lacanian theory
4. Broader debates
5. General summary of chapters
6. Limited Glossary of Terms
7. Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The Trauma of Language. Cantin
1. Human beings as a product of language
2. Language makes real jouissance impossible
3. The introduction of an other jouissance and the paternal function
4. The case of Myriam
Chapter 2: The Jouissance of the Other and the Sexual Division in Psychoanalysis. Apollon
1. Individual satisfaction and the jouissance of the Other
2. The sexual division: procreation, jouissance, and the ethics of masculinity
3. The sexual division: feminine jouissance beyond the phallic
4. Castration: the inadequacy of the Other and the insufficiency of the word
Chapter 3: The Signifier. Bergeron
1. The signifier: a structure behind the scenes
2. The signifier of analytic discourse as a rupture in meaning
3. The navel of the dream: a hole in meaning where jouissance returns
4. Eve of Destruction: the signifier as metaphor of the subject and metonymy of desire
Chapter 4: The Work of the Dream and Jouissance in Treatment of the Psychotic. Bergeron
1. The tyranny of the jouissance of the Other and the absence of the symbolic father
2. Symbolic frame for treatment: delusion to dream, knowledge to ignorance, object to subject
3. The dream as staging the structure of the subject's relation to the Other
4. Bandages on the knees: the dream, the chain of signifiers, and the unrepresented
5. Dreams of the hand: bringing the symptom to pierce the delusion
Chapter 5: From Delusion to Dream. Cantin
1. Dreams treat the real with something symbolic
2. The function of delusion in psychosis: the case of Mr. Owens
3. Introducing dream work in place of the workings of delusion: the case of Mr. T.
Chapter 6: The Letter of the Body. Apollon
1. Transference and the trauma of language: the subject, jouissance, and the signifier
2. The parceled body as a writing of jouissance by the agency of the letter
3. The clinic of the symptom and the ethical action of analysis
Chapter 7: The Symptom. Apollon
1. Jouissance, the object, and the problem of satisfaction
2. Symptom as an inscription and division of jouissance: an anorexic in love
3. The passage to the fantasy as a structuration of leftover jouissance
4. The traversal of the fantasy
Chapter 8: From Symptom to Fantasy. Apollon
1. Marguerite’s dreams: the symptom as a writing of fatal jouissance
2. The clinic of the symptom, or the Freudian passage from symptom to fantasy
3. The Master and Marguerite: the Lacanian clinic and the working through of fantasy
Chapter 9: Perverse Features and the Future of the Drive in Obsessional Neurosis. Bergeron
1. The case of Mr. Beauregard
2. Childhood identifications: ego ideal, ideal ego, and the movement of desire
3. The obsessional, as the imaginary phallus of the mother, looking for the father
4. Perverse features in the obsessional's family and the acting out of fantasy
5. Passage from seduction to castration and the ethical act of the obsessional’s analysis
Chapter 10: Perversion and Hysteria. Cantin
1. The choice and solution of the subject in perversion: jouissance, signifier, and the Other
2. The clinical experience of perversion: the case of Mr. Buckold
3. The hysteric with the pervert
Chapter 11: The Fate of Jouissance in the Pervert-Hysteric Couple. Cantin
1. The drive as an effect of language
2. Seduction as refuge from castration: the letter of the body, the insufficiency of the signifier
3. The pervert's response to the hysteric
4. The pervert and the effect of the signifier
5. The contract and the eradication of the Other
6. Desire leads back to the drive
7. Violence and aggressivity: the violence of the demonstration
Chapter 12: Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword. Bergeron
1. Violence in works of art
2. Mishima's specific violence
3. The production of the Thing in language
4. The "letters of the body" and the return of das Ding
5. The failure of masculine identification
6. The unveiling of the original fantasy
7. From the pen to the sword: the quest for the phallus and for a meaning to his death
Index
Papers by Robert Hughes
In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocrisy in a non-moral sense. Ruminating upon the example of Molière’s Tartuffe, Serres takes up the scandalous imposture of the hypocrite and he shows, at the heart of comic pretence, what this essay describes as an underdetermination of identity and individuation. That is, where readers, theatregoers, and participants in public discourse would ground thought upon a principle of determinacy and individuation—for example determinations of the basic wickedness of hypocrites and parasites—philosophical considerations of these figures (and the phenomenon of comic action) explode this principle to suggest an ontological and discursive space of inconsistency and intermediacy. By examining Tartuffe’s ingratiating language of piety and the play’s surprising figures of grace, this essay shows how discursive systems and social systems are equally devoted to ideals of determinable identity that leave them vulnerable to operators who can discern and exploit the inevitable sites of latent incoherence and inconsistency. The essay concludes by developing Serres’s notions of comedy as a play between consistency and inconsistency, individuation and disindividuation, a sad and severed fragmentariness (as with Plato’s Aristophanes), but also the generative spawning of a supplemental comic critical consciousness.
Résumé
Dans Le Parasite (1980), le philosophe Michel Serres invite le lecteur à penser l’hypocrisie de manière non-morale. En méditant l’exemple du Tartuffe de Molière, Serres se saisit de l’imposture scandaleuse de l’hypocrite et révèle, au cœur de toute prétention comique, ce que cet essai décrit comme une sous-détermination de l’identité et de l’individuation. C’est-à-dire, là où le lecteur, spectateur et participant du discours public fonderaient la pensée sur un principe de détermination et d’individuation – par exemple la détermination de la méchanceté fondamentale de l’hypocrite et du parasite – les considérations philosophiques de ces figures (et le phénomène de l’action comique) font exploser ce principe au profit de la suggestion d’un espace discursif et ontologique incohérent et intermédiaire. En examinant le langage de piété de Tartuffe et la figure surprenante de la grâce, cet essai montre la manière dont les systèmes discursifs et sociaux sont autant l’un que l’autre dévoués aux idéaux d’identité déterminable qui les rend vulnérable aux opérateurs qui discernent et exploitent les points inévitables d’incohérence et de contradiction. L’essai se conclut par l’analyse de la notion de comédie que Serres définit comme un jeu entre la cohérence et l’incohérence, l’individuation et la désindividuation, un état fragmentaire triste et brisé, (comme dans l’Aristophane de Platon) mais aussi l’incarnation générative d’une conscience critique comique supplémentaire.
If your institution has a subscription to the CEEOL database, please do me the favor of accessing this article by clicking on the following link:
http://www.ceeol.com/aspx/issuedetails.aspx?issueid=4d6fd6d5-b78c-4d22-9ffd-00096fdc905f
Scholarly Translations by Robert Hughes
Excerpt not available electronically, but available in print: Paletten Nr. 335-336 (April 2024): 69-74.
Title: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020)
Translation: Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry (Polity Books, 2023)
Translated by Robert Hughes
Overview by Robert Hughes
Sloterdijk’s book considers different ways that, over the past three thousand years, the West has imagined the engagement of otherworldly powers in the life of religious cultures. Sloterdijk’s question: what are the techniques and the conditions of plausibility that allow such constructs to bring divinity before human perception? When these elaborations encounter a historical demand for revision, how might one conceptualize the terms of that revision? How, in other words, are the heavens made to speak? And then made to speak again and again through the centuries?
Sloterdijk’s analyses draw from a broad range of sources. The stage-machinery of Athens offered the numinous presence of the divine by way of its sublimely masked representative floating over the stage. The Egyptian pharaoh was a figure at once human and divine, as if divinity condescended to present itself in the flesh and speak on its own behalf. And, of course, there are the “religions of the book,” in which the divine is held to be present through scripture. Sloterdijk is curious about the figural and rhetorical management of plausibility and implausibility for practitioners, the faithful, and prospective converts.
Sloterdijk observes that many religions are initially a practical matter: observance of precise cultic rites aim to secure for a people the patronage of a powerful otherworldly protector. Over the course of history, religion came to present itself as a something quite different, however: a set of propositions transcendentally true. One signal event was the configuration of Christian thought as the encounter of Semitic inheritances with Greek philosophy, such that theology was driven to logically rationalize an existing and dynamic tradition of thinking about the otherworldly.
The second signal event was the rise of a modern context for religion in the West. Under the monopoly conditions of the Catholic Church, religion had been able to enforce an orthodoxy and thereby limit the wayward impulses of its adherents. With the Protestant break, however, the Western religious “marketplace” came to pose a challenge for any church seeking to impose dogmatic prescriptions. Churchgoers asserted their demands and religion migrated into a kind of aesthetic event radically separate from the theology and orthodoxy of churches. If one of Sloterdijk’s key questions is implied by his title – how are the gods made to speak? – then, with the modern break, the terms of their speaking came to be ever less mediated by the certifications of religious authority and ever more located in the cultivation of a private sensibility and taste for the infinite.
In Sloterdijk’s view, religion in the West is perhaps finally right-sizing itself after all these millennia. If religion had formerly been saddled with a practically limitless portfolio, the social democracies of the West have dispersed many of its roles into secular agencies. What remains to religion suits its competencies far better: the domestication of contingency, the shaping of mortality, and a comprehensive aid to the interpretation of existence in the context of its finitude and its need for happiness.
Sloterdijk posits a communal wakeful watchfulness as the founding condition of civilization’s support for thinking beyond mere survival. When culture metaphysicalized this sentinel function in a new conception of divine surveillance, the entirety of the world became conceivable as thoroughly penetrable by vision and subject to knowledge.
Sloterdijk discusses three civilizations that posited the world as thoroughgoingly susceptible to vision and requiring wakeful watchfulness for its defense: Heraclitus’s Greek polis called upon a coalition of human perception and judgment to defend against the idiocy of night and dream; Zoroaster’s Iranian empire posited the world as cosmic struggle requiring bright, sober thinkers to join their lord against furious confusion; and Isaiah’s Hebrew civilization raised the stakes of theological surveillance in the precarious context of God’s election of the saved.
Metaphysics and modernity have come to functionalize the dark within a positivist frame, refusing the rhythm of coming and going, asserting an everlasting assembly of the whole, positing an absence of absence. In truth, the world itself and we ourselves come forth through rhythms of waking and sleeping. The appearance of the world is conditioned upon these hiatuses and we impoverish it when we foreclose the discrete nothings of its nocturnal aspect.
The age of planetary co-existence calls for a new evolution in the wakeful watchfulness of a world undergoing inexorable devastation.
Short essays by Bernard Stiegler on key terms in his philosophy (translated by Robert Hughes, 2015).
Follow the URL link above to arsindustrialis.org to explore the following:
Pharmakon, pharmacology
Prostheticity
Technics of the self
Technics of the Mind and Spirit
Relational technologies
Technoscience
Organology
Hypomnēmata
Subsist, Exist, Consist
Anamnēsis, hypomnēsis (Memory)
700-word entry on the theme of the amateur, written by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2013). Kindly follow the link on this page to the arsindustrialis site for the free paper.
To further develop the theoretical stakes of these literary readings, the book also examines the work of four twentieth-century continental thinkers, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou, who, in psychoanalysis and philosophy, renewed the effort to think about a non-cognitive dimension of ethics. Moreover, as this book argues, each in their various ways proposed aesthetics or art as an approach to this dimension. Thus, it is shown that literature, as a mode of expression that draws its force from a certain relation to the incomprehensible, the unknown, or the unconscious, is able to open up that part of ethics that has resisted more traditional philosophy.
The unique contribution of this book, as a comparativist analysis of American literature, is to bring nineteenth-century American literature into contact with the continental tradition in aesthetics. By situating early American fictions as participants within a larger discourse about art and ethics, this book thereby broadens the possibilities for understanding these texts beyond their traditional historicist confines, and does so without denying the importance of history. And, as a theoretical meditation on the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, this book claims importance for the way it describes a hitherto obscured trend in continental thought to argue that this intersection of ethics and aesthetics is both necessary and inevitable. Finally, this project points to an overlooked common lineage, descending from German Romanticism, between American Romanticism and contemporary continental thought: a shared supposition about the limits of reason as a mode of presenting the essence of art and ethics and a shared faith in the promise of literature to speak to, or open up this subjective space of foundational ethics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction 1
Opening Questions: Ethics, Literature, and the Beyond of Language
In Lieu of a Historical Introduction
Chapter 1: Sleepy Hollow: Fearful Pleasures and the Nightmare of History 13
Rhythmic Beauty and Dreamy Charm: Memory, History, and the Pleasurable Tale
Sleepy Hollow and the Nightmare of History
Fearful Pleasures: From Trauma to the Uncanny
Postscript: The Moral of the Story and What it Goes to Prove
Chapter 2: Lacan and the Beyond of Language: From Art to Ethics 39
The Work of Art, the Emptiness of the Signifier, the Representation of the Thing
The Head of Beatrice: The Mystery of the Beautiful and the Limit of Death
Ethics: From the Vicissitudes of Being to the Passion of the Signifier
Chapter 3: Brown’s Wieland and the Ethical Circumscription of Death 61
Literary Morality and the Romance of Family Murder
The Presence of the Divine Word and the Movement of the Signifier
The Unforsaken Image
Writing out of Death
Chapter 4: Heideggerian Ethics: The Voice of Art and the Call to Being 85
Language, Poetry, and the Unconcealment of Being
Heidegger’s Van Gogh: The Shoes That Stared, the Painting That Spoke
The Call of Language and the Obligation to Bear Witness to One’s Existence
Not at Home: Heidegger and the Ethical Uncanny
Chapter 5: Levinas: Art and the Transcendence of Solitude 113
Art and the Grammar of Being
Aesthetics, Vulnerability, and Proximity to the Other
Saying the Word and Seeking the Other in the Poem
Irresistible: The Event of Art and the Call for an Ethical Criticism
Chapter 6: Endings: Ethics, Enigma, and Address in The Marble Faun 137
Hawthorne’s Final Romance
Time, the Eternal City, and the Disadvantage of History for Life
The End of the Romance, the Death of the Reader, and the Impossible Address
Chapter 7: Riven: Badiou’s Ethical Subject and the Event of Art as Trauma 159
The Event of Art: The Hole of Truth and the Punctured Subject
A Thing of Nothing: Ethics and the Phantom Excess
Badiou on Levinas, Love, and the Poetic Naming of Ethics
Epilogue: Word after Word 185
Notes 189
Works Cited 215
Index 225
Apollon, Bergeron, and Cantin, as founders of the École freudienne du Québec and the Gifric group have long been involved in political, academic, and clinical activities and have, moreover, developed a vital and well-respected clinical practice within Quebec. Gifric is especially well known for its innovative work with young adult psychotics, although the psychoanalytic practice of this group is wide ranging, as this collection will also attest. Although the authors have presented and published widely in North America and are active in a number of psychoanalytic organizations, there is no currently existing collection in English that presents their careful and innovative work. This book represents just such a collection.
The papers may be understood as addressing four areas of interest to academic Lacanians and to English-speaking psychoanalysts seriously interested in Lacan. The early chapters are devoted to the general concepts (for example, the jouissance of the Other, the sexual division, and the paternal function) and key terms (dream, signifier, and interpretation) that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The next chapters focus on the groundbreaking clinic of psychosis that Gifric has pioneered in Québec—how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. The next chapters turn toward the second phase of analytic treatment, introducing a new set of terms—the letter of the body, the symptom, the fantasy—to understand the genesis within the transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject’s assumption of the Other’s lack. The concluding chapters are especially rich in clinical material, and broaden the understanding of the analytic clinic by discussing the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: obsessional and hysterical neurosis, perversion, and (again) psychosis.
The volume is co-edited and introduced by Robert Hughes and Kareen Malone, an academic in the humanities and a psychologist. These two differing perspectives attempt to balance a certain tension in the reception of Lacan—namely, the inappropriate division between his theoretical elaborations and their clinical instantiation. It is the implicit argument of all the chapters, and is explicitly argued in the Introduction, that the crucial event of Lacan’s teaching and theoretical articulation follows from the clinical encounter, and that this encounter remains the core of any truly Lacanian theoretical elaboration, whether explicitly or implicitly. Although there are a number of rigorous theoretical accounts of Lacan, an indescribably important dimension is lost when any such account does not consider the clinical referent of so many of Lacan’s ideas. The clinical practice of psychoanalysis is the experiment with the unconscious, begun by Freud, that Lacan sought to deepen and formalize. After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious returns us to that experiment.
The Journal for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society called this “an important book that must interest anyone concerned with the practical import of Lacan’s work, but also anyone drawn to Lacanian theory.” The Division of Psychoanalysis of the American Psychological Association writes “If After Lacan had simply explicated Lacanian concepts and animated them with clinical vignettes, it would have accomplished a great deal. But clearly this volume is more than that. It reshapes the psychoanalytic landscape…"
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Dialectic of Theory and Clinic. Hughes and Malone
1. Some questions in the Lacanian field and the work of Gifric
2. Academic interest in the Lacanian clinic
3. Clinical interest in Lacanian theory
4. Broader debates
5. General summary of chapters
6. Limited Glossary of Terms
7. Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: The Trauma of Language. Cantin
1. Human beings as a product of language
2. Language makes real jouissance impossible
3. The introduction of an other jouissance and the paternal function
4. The case of Myriam
Chapter 2: The Jouissance of the Other and the Sexual Division in Psychoanalysis. Apollon
1. Individual satisfaction and the jouissance of the Other
2. The sexual division: procreation, jouissance, and the ethics of masculinity
3. The sexual division: feminine jouissance beyond the phallic
4. Castration: the inadequacy of the Other and the insufficiency of the word
Chapter 3: The Signifier. Bergeron
1. The signifier: a structure behind the scenes
2. The signifier of analytic discourse as a rupture in meaning
3. The navel of the dream: a hole in meaning where jouissance returns
4. Eve of Destruction: the signifier as metaphor of the subject and metonymy of desire
Chapter 4: The Work of the Dream and Jouissance in Treatment of the Psychotic. Bergeron
1. The tyranny of the jouissance of the Other and the absence of the symbolic father
2. Symbolic frame for treatment: delusion to dream, knowledge to ignorance, object to subject
3. The dream as staging the structure of the subject's relation to the Other
4. Bandages on the knees: the dream, the chain of signifiers, and the unrepresented
5. Dreams of the hand: bringing the symptom to pierce the delusion
Chapter 5: From Delusion to Dream. Cantin
1. Dreams treat the real with something symbolic
2. The function of delusion in psychosis: the case of Mr. Owens
3. Introducing dream work in place of the workings of delusion: the case of Mr. T.
Chapter 6: The Letter of the Body. Apollon
1. Transference and the trauma of language: the subject, jouissance, and the signifier
2. The parceled body as a writing of jouissance by the agency of the letter
3. The clinic of the symptom and the ethical action of analysis
Chapter 7: The Symptom. Apollon
1. Jouissance, the object, and the problem of satisfaction
2. Symptom as an inscription and division of jouissance: an anorexic in love
3. The passage to the fantasy as a structuration of leftover jouissance
4. The traversal of the fantasy
Chapter 8: From Symptom to Fantasy. Apollon
1. Marguerite’s dreams: the symptom as a writing of fatal jouissance
2. The clinic of the symptom, or the Freudian passage from symptom to fantasy
3. The Master and Marguerite: the Lacanian clinic and the working through of fantasy
Chapter 9: Perverse Features and the Future of the Drive in Obsessional Neurosis. Bergeron
1. The case of Mr. Beauregard
2. Childhood identifications: ego ideal, ideal ego, and the movement of desire
3. The obsessional, as the imaginary phallus of the mother, looking for the father
4. Perverse features in the obsessional's family and the acting out of fantasy
5. Passage from seduction to castration and the ethical act of the obsessional’s analysis
Chapter 10: Perversion and Hysteria. Cantin
1. The choice and solution of the subject in perversion: jouissance, signifier, and the Other
2. The clinical experience of perversion: the case of Mr. Buckold
3. The hysteric with the pervert
Chapter 11: The Fate of Jouissance in the Pervert-Hysteric Couple. Cantin
1. The drive as an effect of language
2. Seduction as refuge from castration: the letter of the body, the insufficiency of the signifier
3. The pervert's response to the hysteric
4. The pervert and the effect of the signifier
5. The contract and the eradication of the Other
6. Desire leads back to the drive
7. Violence and aggressivity: the violence of the demonstration
Chapter 12: Violence in Works of Art, or, Mishima, from the Pen to the Sword. Bergeron
1. Violence in works of art
2. Mishima's specific violence
3. The production of the Thing in language
4. The "letters of the body" and the return of das Ding
5. The failure of masculine identification
6. The unveiling of the original fantasy
7. From the pen to the sword: the quest for the phallus and for a meaning to his death
Index
In The Parasite (1980), philosopher Michel Serres invites readers to reflect on hypocrisy in a non-moral sense. Ruminating upon the example of Molière’s Tartuffe, Serres takes up the scandalous imposture of the hypocrite and he shows, at the heart of comic pretence, what this essay describes as an underdetermination of identity and individuation. That is, where readers, theatregoers, and participants in public discourse would ground thought upon a principle of determinacy and individuation—for example determinations of the basic wickedness of hypocrites and parasites—philosophical considerations of these figures (and the phenomenon of comic action) explode this principle to suggest an ontological and discursive space of inconsistency and intermediacy. By examining Tartuffe’s ingratiating language of piety and the play’s surprising figures of grace, this essay shows how discursive systems and social systems are equally devoted to ideals of determinable identity that leave them vulnerable to operators who can discern and exploit the inevitable sites of latent incoherence and inconsistency. The essay concludes by developing Serres’s notions of comedy as a play between consistency and inconsistency, individuation and disindividuation, a sad and severed fragmentariness (as with Plato’s Aristophanes), but also the generative spawning of a supplemental comic critical consciousness.
Résumé
Dans Le Parasite (1980), le philosophe Michel Serres invite le lecteur à penser l’hypocrisie de manière non-morale. En méditant l’exemple du Tartuffe de Molière, Serres se saisit de l’imposture scandaleuse de l’hypocrite et révèle, au cœur de toute prétention comique, ce que cet essai décrit comme une sous-détermination de l’identité et de l’individuation. C’est-à-dire, là où le lecteur, spectateur et participant du discours public fonderaient la pensée sur un principe de détermination et d’individuation – par exemple la détermination de la méchanceté fondamentale de l’hypocrite et du parasite – les considérations philosophiques de ces figures (et le phénomène de l’action comique) font exploser ce principe au profit de la suggestion d’un espace discursif et ontologique incohérent et intermédiaire. En examinant le langage de piété de Tartuffe et la figure surprenante de la grâce, cet essai montre la manière dont les systèmes discursifs et sociaux sont autant l’un que l’autre dévoués aux idéaux d’identité déterminable qui les rend vulnérable aux opérateurs qui discernent et exploitent les points inévitables d’incohérence et de contradiction. L’essai se conclut par l’analyse de la notion de comédie que Serres définit comme un jeu entre la cohérence et l’incohérence, l’individuation et la désindividuation, un état fragmentaire triste et brisé, (comme dans l’Aristophane de Platon) mais aussi l’incarnation générative d’une conscience critique comique supplémentaire.
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Excerpt not available electronically, but available in print: Paletten Nr. 335-336 (April 2024): 69-74.
Title: Den Himmel zum Sprechen bringen (Suhrkamp Verlag, 2020)
Translation: Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry (Polity Books, 2023)
Translated by Robert Hughes
Overview by Robert Hughes
Sloterdijk’s book considers different ways that, over the past three thousand years, the West has imagined the engagement of otherworldly powers in the life of religious cultures. Sloterdijk’s question: what are the techniques and the conditions of plausibility that allow such constructs to bring divinity before human perception? When these elaborations encounter a historical demand for revision, how might one conceptualize the terms of that revision? How, in other words, are the heavens made to speak? And then made to speak again and again through the centuries?
Sloterdijk’s analyses draw from a broad range of sources. The stage-machinery of Athens offered the numinous presence of the divine by way of its sublimely masked representative floating over the stage. The Egyptian pharaoh was a figure at once human and divine, as if divinity condescended to present itself in the flesh and speak on its own behalf. And, of course, there are the “religions of the book,” in which the divine is held to be present through scripture. Sloterdijk is curious about the figural and rhetorical management of plausibility and implausibility for practitioners, the faithful, and prospective converts.
Sloterdijk observes that many religions are initially a practical matter: observance of precise cultic rites aim to secure for a people the patronage of a powerful otherworldly protector. Over the course of history, religion came to present itself as a something quite different, however: a set of propositions transcendentally true. One signal event was the configuration of Christian thought as the encounter of Semitic inheritances with Greek philosophy, such that theology was driven to logically rationalize an existing and dynamic tradition of thinking about the otherworldly.
The second signal event was the rise of a modern context for religion in the West. Under the monopoly conditions of the Catholic Church, religion had been able to enforce an orthodoxy and thereby limit the wayward impulses of its adherents. With the Protestant break, however, the Western religious “marketplace” came to pose a challenge for any church seeking to impose dogmatic prescriptions. Churchgoers asserted their demands and religion migrated into a kind of aesthetic event radically separate from the theology and orthodoxy of churches. If one of Sloterdijk’s key questions is implied by his title – how are the gods made to speak? – then, with the modern break, the terms of their speaking came to be ever less mediated by the certifications of religious authority and ever more located in the cultivation of a private sensibility and taste for the infinite.
In Sloterdijk’s view, religion in the West is perhaps finally right-sizing itself after all these millennia. If religion had formerly been saddled with a practically limitless portfolio, the social democracies of the West have dispersed many of its roles into secular agencies. What remains to religion suits its competencies far better: the domestication of contingency, the shaping of mortality, and a comprehensive aid to the interpretation of existence in the context of its finitude and its need for happiness.
Sloterdijk posits a communal wakeful watchfulness as the founding condition of civilization’s support for thinking beyond mere survival. When culture metaphysicalized this sentinel function in a new conception of divine surveillance, the entirety of the world became conceivable as thoroughly penetrable by vision and subject to knowledge.
Sloterdijk discusses three civilizations that posited the world as thoroughgoingly susceptible to vision and requiring wakeful watchfulness for its defense: Heraclitus’s Greek polis called upon a coalition of human perception and judgment to defend against the idiocy of night and dream; Zoroaster’s Iranian empire posited the world as cosmic struggle requiring bright, sober thinkers to join their lord against furious confusion; and Isaiah’s Hebrew civilization raised the stakes of theological surveillance in the precarious context of God’s election of the saved.
Metaphysics and modernity have come to functionalize the dark within a positivist frame, refusing the rhythm of coming and going, asserting an everlasting assembly of the whole, positing an absence of absence. In truth, the world itself and we ourselves come forth through rhythms of waking and sleeping. The appearance of the world is conditioned upon these hiatuses and we impoverish it when we foreclose the discrete nothings of its nocturnal aspect.
The age of planetary co-existence calls for a new evolution in the wakeful watchfulness of a world undergoing inexorable devastation.
Short essays by Bernard Stiegler on key terms in his philosophy (translated by Robert Hughes, 2015).
Follow the URL link above to arsindustrialis.org to explore the following:
Pharmakon, pharmacology
Prostheticity
Technics of the self
Technics of the Mind and Spirit
Relational technologies
Technoscience
Organology
Hypomnēmata
Subsist, Exist, Consist
Anamnēsis, hypomnēsis (Memory)
700-word entry on the theme of the amateur, written by Bernard Stiegler (translated by Robert Hughes, 2013). Kindly follow the link on this page to the arsindustrialis site for the free paper.