psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory by Kirk Turner
Psychoanalysis, Culture, Society, 2022
This article [preprint version, co-authored with Dr Kirk Turner, final publication details below]... more This article [preprint version, co-authored with Dr Kirk Turner, final publication details below] examines Jacques Lacan's sessions of Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, in which he analyzed Wittgenstein's early, classic work, The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Despite Lacan's and Wittgenstein's huge influence across disciplines (and the analytic-continental divide), there has been no scholarly attempt to examine Lacan's claims concerning Wittgenstein in this Seminar. This paper redresses this gap in the literature. In part 1, we place Lacan's turn to Wittgenstein in Seminar XVII in the context of his earlier, briefer engagements with Wittgenstein, Russell and Frege, and track Lacan's reconstruction of the key claims of the TLP in his Seminar. As we show, Lacan is moved to examine Wittgenstein in the Seminar firstly in order to contrast Wittgenstein's conception of truth with his own distinction between truth and knowledge. Part 2 lays out Lacan’s striking critique of the younger Wittgenstein in this light, centering around the claim that, when it is the truth of the subject and the unconscious at issue, “Wittgenstein wasn’t interested in saving the truth. Nothing can be said about it”: a position which Lacan suggests is meaningfully psychotic. The concluding remarks reflect critically on Lacan’s position, underscoring that his claims concern the logical and philosophical structure of Wittgenstein’s discourse in the TLP, as against psychobiography. We close by offering an interpretation of Lacan's further enigmatic claim that the young Wittgenstein’s effacement of the register of subjectivity from his conception of the truth uncannily mirrors the subject-position of the analyst in the Lacanian clinic. [*Version not for citation--the published version of this article is available at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41282-022-00281-5]
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2022
In Alain Badiou's most recent work, L'immanence des vérités (The Immanence of Truths), psychoanal... more In Alain Badiou's most recent work, L'immanence des vérités (The Immanence of Truths), psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once again figures peripherally but saliently. What is their specific relation in this text, however? We argue that Badiou responds here to the problem raised precisely by the Lacanian subject, situated as it is between the radical subjectivity of the symptom and the possibility of formalization. In L'immanence, he introduces the term 'absoluteness' to secure truths against both relativism and transcendental construction. We show that in drawing on Lacan to establish an understanding of the absolute, Badiou highlights the implicit tension between psychoanalysis and philosophy. We treat central cross-currents-truths, knowledge, the event and love-to help reveal the specific character of their confluence in this third book of Badiou's trilogy. Although he stresses the unity of his and Lacan's efforts, the impossible Real marking their divisions also invariably emerges the closer one investigates.
Cosmos & History, 2019
In the context of resistances to the historical 'blows' to 'human self-love' enumerated by Sigmun... more In the context of resistances to the historical 'blows' to 'human self-love' enumerated by Sigmund Freud (Copernicus decentering the Earth; Darwin removing the barrier between humans and animals; his own efforts in showing how the unconscious subverts the supposed mastery of the conscious ego), Jacques Lacan's early formulations and probings on the topic of subjectivity in his second seminar include, in a not uncharacteristic, but yet somewhat bizarre, digression, an envisionment of 'science fiction' involving the extinction of the entire human population and a recording device which continues to operate following the event. Specifically, Lacan questions what consequences this has for our understandings of consciousness (including subsequent philosophical objections); what status the recording instrument would possess; and what a repopulating society would make of the recorded materials once they had learnt to access and interpret them. In exploring this scenario, along with what Lacan describes as his 'materialist definition of the phenomenon of consciousness', we will begin to appreciate how the notion of the human becomes a psychical assemblage pieced together to experience a fragile unity. Relatedly, the human species will historically be seen to have carried with it, and continually reinforced, certain fundamental prejudices: cosmological, biological and psychological. What the 'limit' example of extinction will make clear is the extent to which the material world affects the human 'prerogatives' of self-preservation and self-interest. What is called for is the overcoming of historical preconceptions along with the forms of domination they are invariably coupled with. Recent discussions of extraterrestrial colonization will be seen then to be mere compensatory narratives which ultimately obfuscate the very real – and urgent – need to rethink our misguided sense of 'control'. Does the ultimately destructive (and in some respects irreversible) course engaged in vis-à-vis Earth's natural environment – due to this form of universalized narcissism – necessarily need to be countered with the prospect of humankind's own obliteration in order for change to occur?
Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytic Political Theory [preprint], 2018
This chapter examines Žižek’s theorizations of ‘ideological fantasy’ and its different manifestat... more This chapter examines Žižek’s theorizations of ‘ideological fantasy’ and its different manifestations or veils (Žižek 1997: 1-35). We begin (part 1) by recalling the fundamental coordinates of Freud’s, then Lacan’s, conceptions of fantasy, allowing a theoretical lineage to be established which accounts for Žižek’s coaptation and extension of what was originally a clinical term. Part 2 then turns, in this light, to Žižek’s reformulation of ‘fantasy’ in the context of a post-Marxian theory of ideology. First, we pursue Žižek’s critique of the Marxist notion of ‘false consciousness’, by way of his famous analyses of ideological cynicism, into his theory of ideological disidentification, and the function of ideological fantasy in structuring groups’ quasi-transgressive forms of jouissance. Second, we look at Žižek’s analyses of sublime objects of ideology, and the function of ideological fantasy in papering over social antagonism or ‘the Real’ by constructing narratives of the loss or theft of jouissance. As an avenue for future research, we show just how well and powerfully Žižek’s theory allows us to comprehend contemporary Right-wing populism as an ideological formation.
Parrhesia, 2017
Engaging with numerous philosophers of divergent persuasions throughout his lifetime, Jacques Lac... more Engaging with numerous philosophers of divergent persuasions throughout his lifetime, Jacques Lacan may be said to have been principally interested in the possibilities of the extension of certain philosophical concepts and ideas as such, and less so in their thinkers' total systems or theoretical positionings. Emblematic of this, a consistent preoccupation with the precursor/influence (founder?) of the analytic philosophical tradition, Gottlob Frege, throughout his series of Paris seminars over a number of years attests to the fact that Lacan held in esteemed regard the mathematician's insights into language as well as the (convoluted) place of subjectivity in the performance of logical analyses. Along with his psychoanalytic students who were involved with the publication Cahiers pour l'Analyse in the mid-60s, Lacan approached Frege in regard to three main issues represented by three key texts: conceptual variations and forms of inscription in his early Begriffsschrift (1879); the function of number outlined in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884); and the nature of naming in his 1892 paper 'Über Sinn und Bedeutung' wherein factors such as the subjective and objective representation of objects and their denomination were supremely relevant during this 'high structuralist' period. With his own forays into formalization and logic, Lacan was fascinated by the difficulties in ascribing any simple role to the function of thought, similar to the stumbling blocks enumerated by Frege in attempting to determine a logical structure of/through language. In the following discussion, we will return to the latter of Frege's original German texts to examine some of these complications in detail while scanning the Lacanian seminars to tease out his dealings with Frege (a thematic underdeveloped to date in scholarship). Ultimately we hope to determine whether Lacan's additions, particularly on the role of the unconscious, make impossible the attempt to conceive of a 'pure' logic of thought. Based on the illuminations Lacan and his entourage discovered in Frege's work, we will also indicate the future avenues wherein these cross-currents may be further elaborated and synthesized.
International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2017
The Lacanian concept of fantasy is an essential locus for the conception of subjectivity and real... more The Lacanian concept of fantasy is an essential locus for the conception of subjectivity and reality in the work of Slavoj Žižek, particularly in his initial English texts from 1989–2002 (roughly from his first major book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, to Welcome to the Desert of the Real). Whilst looked at creatively in its various guises and extended beyond clinical applications in his vast oeuvre – e.g. toward the exploration of the social, in terms of ideological fantasy foremost, to fuller elaborations in The Plague of Fantasies and beyond – the conceptual heritage (from philosophical analogues to Freud's definitions and ruminations; to Freud's followers, particularly Klein; to the early works of Lacan, i.e. the scattered articles of the 1930s and 1940s as well as Family Complexes; and to a strictly Lacanian definition of fantasy developed in the early seminars) is in need of fleshing out within contemporary scholarship. To this end, and as part of a larger project currently underway, in the following we will trace the somewhat staggered development of the concept of fantasy in Lacan's initial meetings held at le Centre hospitalier Sainte-Anne between 1953 and 1961 where 'fantasy' as subjective component (as opposed to fantasies, fantasizing as such, etc.) was truly born. Ultimately, the understanding of this trajectory and the changing significations involved in conceptual evolution can broaden our insight into Lacan's (and therefore Žižek's) theoretical methodology as well as their insistence on retaining the category of subject in the philosophical tradition.
philosophy as a way of life, metaphilosophy by Kirk Turner
The paper (Foucault Studies, 25 [see link to site*]) builds upon a growing body of critical resea... more The paper (Foucault Studies, 25 [see link to site*]) builds upon a growing body of critical research on the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research, but brings to it a specifically Foucauldian, genealogical approach. The paper has three parts. Part 1 situates bibliometrics as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other 'metrics' (led by biometrics) that have emerged in the last two decades. Part 2 analyses bibliometrics' antecedents in prior notational practices in the Western heritage, highlighting how forms of noting have almost always had political valences, tied to projects either of control or, with Bayle and the philosophes, of subversion. Part 3 delineates the specific features of bibliometrics as a new form of notation, highlighting the latest forms of academic subjectivity bibliometrics suppose and increasingly are summoning into being.
* https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/5578/6221
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psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory by Kirk Turner
philosophy as a way of life, metaphilosophy by Kirk Turner
* https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/5578/6221
* https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/5578/6221