Lacanian Antiphilosophy And The Problem Of Anxiety

This book brings Jacques Lacan's work on the problem of anxiety into a jarring and fruitful confrontation with phenomenology, existentialism, and the 'jargon' of authenticity. Brian Robertson masterfully upends a host of received philosophical truths - most notably, and crucially, the idea that anxiety 'lacks an object.'

This book brings Jacques Lacan's work on the problem of anxiety into a jarring and fruitful confrontation with phenomenology, existentialism, and the 'jargon' of authenticity. Brian Robertson masterfully upends a host of received philosophical truths - most notably, and crucially, the idea that anxiety 'lacks an object.'

In this exciting new collection, leading and emerging Lacanian scholars seek to understand what psychoanalysis brings to debates about the environment and the climate crisis. They argue that we cannot understand climate change and all of its multifarious ramifications without first understanding how our terrifying proximity to the real undergirds our relation to the environment, how we mistake lack for loss and mourning for melancholy, and how we seek to destroy the same world we seek to protect. The book traces Lacan’s contribution through a consideration of topics including doomsday preppers, forest suicides, Indigenous resistance, post-apocalyptic films, the mathematics of climate science, and the relevance of Kant. They ask: What can you do if your neighbour is a climate change denier? What would Bartleby do? Does the animal desire? Who is cleaning up all the garbage on the internet? Why is the sudden greening of the planet under COVID-19 no help whatsoever? It offers a timely intervention into Lacanian theory, environmental studies, geography, philosophy, and literary studies that illustrates the relevance of psychoanalysis to current social and environmental concerns.

A theorization of habit that emphasizes its excessive and unsettling qualities rather than its mediating, adaptive, and stabilizing functions. Subject Matter offers a bold counterpoint to prevalent conceptions of habit characterized by bodily fluidity and ease, as the stabilizing foundation of an emerging subjectivity, or, more negatively, as a numbing and deadening force. Instead of facilitating the coordination of action with goal and self with environment, habit appears here as a disruptively recursive operation with extreme ontological implications that are often more quotidian than exceptional. Vinegar theorizes habit’s more perturbing aspects, from repetition compulsion to kenosis to breakdown, through an encounter between Hegel’s philosophy (of habit), psychoanalytic dimensions of repetition, Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder, and Omer Fast’s feature-length film interpretation of the novel. Vinegar starts with the premise that habit is an “unhappy mediator,” a disturbance of the very medium and milieu that is constitutive of the subject. Subject Matter pays close attention to those aspects of habit that are usually considered deviations from, or potential threats to, habit proper and that generate a logic of breakdown: automaticity, mechanization, thingness, inertia, and fixity. By plotting a topology of habit’s unbearability through detailed accounts of its manifestation in writing, art, aesthetics, and visuality—and through an attentiveness to the unbalanced nonrelations between mediation and immediacy, being and having, fixity and fluidity, vanishing and overflowing, abbreviation and excess, beginning and ending—Vinegar exposes habit’s failure to mediate and inhabit. In doing so, he offers new and counterintuitive insights into how habit generates the unruly grounds it is supposed to settle, thus allowing us to ask how we might break down differently.

This book explores how philosophical realisms relate to psychoanalytical conceptions of the Real, and in turn how the Lacanian framework challenges basic philosophical notions of object and reality. The author examines how contemporary psychoanalysis might respond to the question of ontology by taking advantage of the recent revitalization of realism in its speculative form. While the philosophical side of the debate makes a plea for an independent ontological consistency of the Real, this book proposes a Lacanian reassessment of the definition of the Real as ‘what is foreign to subjectivity itself’. In doing so, it reframes the question of the Real in terms of what is already there beneath the supposedly linguistic constitution of subjectivity. The book then goes on to engage the problem of cognition in the realm of Nature qua materiality, focusing on the centrality of the body as a linguistic-material hybrid. It argues that it is possible to re-establish the theoretical dignity of Ricoeur’s notion of ‘suspicion’, by building a dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and three main domains of inquiry: desire, objects and bodily enjoyment. Borrowing from Piera Aulagnier’s theory of the Other as a word-bearer, it considers the genesis of desire and sense of reality both explainable through a hybrid framework which comprises psychoanalytical insights and material dynamics in a comprehensive account. This created theoretical space is an opportunity for both philosophers and psychoanalysts to rethink key Lacanian insights in light of the problem of the Real.

This book is the first to systematically investigate how the notion of time is conceptualised in Jacques Lacan’s work. Through a careful examination of Lacan’s various presentations of time, Chenyang Wang argues that this notion is key to a comprehension of Lacan’s psychoanalytic thinking, and in particular to the way in which he theorises subjectivity. This book demonstrates that time is approached by Lacan not only as consciously experienced, but also as pre-reflectively embodied and symbolically generated. In an analysis that begins with Lacan’s “Logical Time” essay, Chenyang Wang articulates three temporal registers that correspond to Lacan's Real-Symbolic-Imaginary triad and also demonstrates how Lacan’s elaboration of other major themes including consciousness, body, language, desire and sexuality is informed by his original perspectives on time. Filling a significant gap in contemporary Lacanian studies, this book will provide essential reading for students and scholars of psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy and critical theory.

Designed for novices as well as students of psychology and literary criticism, these systematic lectures do much to clarify Lacan's groundbreaking work on the birth of the subject and its links with Freud's theory of drives. Moreover, they answer some of the criticisms that have been leveled at Lacan by forms of psychoanalysis unable or unwilling to incorporate his ideas.

The story of Don Juan first appeared in writing in seventeenth-century Spain, reaching Russia about a century later. Its real impact, however, was delayed until Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, put his own, unique, and uniquely inspirational, spin on the tale. Published in 1830, TheStone Guest is now recognized, with other Pushkin masterpieces, as part of the Russian literary canon. Alexander Burry traces the influence of Pushkin’s brilliant innovations to the legend, which he shows have proven repeatedly fruitful through successive ages of Russian literature, from the Realist to the Silver Age, Soviet, and contemporary periods. Burry shows that, rather than creating a simple retelling of an originally religious tale about a sinful, consummate seducer, Pushkin offered open-ended scenes, re-envisioned and complicated characters, and new motifs that became recursive and productive parts of Russian literature, in ways that even Pushkin himself could never have predicted.