In this work, we will try to outline the position of desire and representation in the constitution of the capture apparatus of the imperial machine. For this, we will try to represent the way in which the libido itself is represented both in the primitive socius and in the barbarian socius. To carry out this path, we will start from two base texts: the first will be The Anti-Oedipus, where we trace the genesis of production, registration and consumption; together with (...) the text by Thousand Plateaus entitled The Capturing Apparatus, where we highlight the movement of the State's genesis and how, its conception is indifferent to the notion of the modern subject, as it is based on the flows of desire and on its ideal and concrete representations. In addition to this outline, we will seek to establish the influences of Marx and Engels on the conceptions of Deleuze and Guattari, in spite of the process of reflection about the genesis of the State. For this, we take the bibliographies of Marx and Engels indicated by the French authors – referenced in the two texts cited above – in their description of the genesis of the capture apparatus that is the State. Such works are specifically: A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy, The German Ideology and the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts. (shrink)

This paper describes the relationship between technics and desire in light of Bernard Stiegler’s new critique of political economy. The starting point for the analysis is Stiegler’s critique of the reinterpretation of Freud’s legacy by Herbert Marcuse in Eros and Civilization. The context of the analysis is the ongoing mutation of consumer capitalism into computational capitalism—one in which automated calculation systems are used to control all forms of mental and affective human activity. Digital automatization, I argue, encourages a different view (...) of what Marcuse called “the automatization of the superego.” It also requires us to rethink to what extent desire is conditioned techno-logically beyond the limits of Marcuse’s critique of Freud, capitalism and technology. The article pays special attention to Stiegler’s reinterpretation of the theory of sublimation in relation to contemporary capitalism and its technological infrastructure (from television to digital platforms). It is also an attempt to include the question concerning technology in psychoanalytic thinking. (shrink)

This essay aims to answer the question: how does Žižek reconcile Hegel’s immanence of gap with Deleuze’s immanence of flux? The contrast between the Deleuzian flux and the Hegelian gap is positivity versus negativity, externality versus internality, and virtuality versus actuality. Via Lacanian not-all, Žižek inserts Hegelian negativity into the absolute positivity of the Deleuzian univocity. In keeping up with Hegelian immanence without externality, Žižek encloses Deleuzian externality by regarding anti-Oedipus as the inner transgression of desire via the shift (...) of perspective. Ending up with the subject supposed to know via retroactivities, the Deleuzian subject as desire finds an affinity with the Hegelian subject of letting-it-be. The reconciliation is mutual. Though Žižek tries to reconcile Deleuzian pure difference with self-identity, and pure repetition with self-sublation and negativity, Hegelian negativity is interpreted as the repetitive death drive, and a Hegelian coherent narration of Hegel-Kierkegaard-Freud-Deleuze is developed. What we get in the end is a Hegelian Deleuze, and Hegel as the Platonist of the virtual. (shrink)

As Freud convincingly shows, civilised political life is a source of constant uneasiness. Desire propels the subject towards an end that remains unfulfilled and pleasure is reduced to a transition from one moment of displeasure to another. Freud conceives pleasure as suppression of an absence, as the result of a process. Marcuse in his turn showed that excessive pleasure works as a counterbalance for displeasure, the repression of sexual impulse and the hypertrophy of the genitalia producing intense pleasure. A post-Freudian (...) theory of pleasure would complement Marcuse’s materialist critique of psychoanalysis by learning to conceive pure pleasure (with Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics) in a non-metaphysical way, segregated from the notion of superfluity. (shrink)

"S'inscrivant dans la démarche générale de l'École de Francfort, s'efforçant d'unir la démarche dialectique et matérialiste du marxisme avec la psychanalyse, dans le cadre d'un projet visant l'émancipation totale de l'homme, la philosophie sociale critique du "Grand Refus" esquissée par Herbert Marcuse est caractérisée par une lecture beaucoup plus radicale des écrits de Freud, par I 'effort de dépasser le fatalisme de Freud et la tentative de s'interroger sur le visage particulier que prennent la répression, la sublimation de la sexualité, (...) le refoulement et l'agressivité dans nos sociétés modernes industrielles très avancées. Ainsi appelle-t-il "surrépression" la répression inutile et irrationnelle qui les caractérise. Le présent ouvrage s'efforce de reconstruire l'itinéraire philosophico-sociologico-politique de ce grand penseur germano-américain incarnant le désir d'une société future non-répressive, dont l'œuvre avait atteint, à l'époque de la révolte étudiante et de la Guerre du Vietnam, un rayonnement mondial, en consacrant des analyses précises et approfondies à chacune des étapes de sa pensée."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

The romanticization of the ‘non-human’ which implicitly ideologizes and transhumanizes modern thought in the form of all that is associated with object-oriented ontology, builds not only on obvious starting points (‘deep ecology’, the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari), but also tries to rethink ‘in its favor’ antagonistic paradigms and discourses. These include the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this article, we will show that not only an external orientation, but also internal gaps, can create an impetus for such a ‘neutralization’. Jacques (...) Lacan’s attempt to remain ‘loyal’ both to the ‘classical subject of the soul’ and to the Real (pre-/beyond-subjective, residual) has resulted in a contradictory concept of desire, having a paradoxical implosive potential which, in turn, was unlocked by the new-materialist, post/transhumanist reading of Lacan. The analysis of desire topic, fundamental to Lacan’s clinical methodology, shows how fragile and susceptible to external attacks is the hermetic conceptual apparatus developed for purely clinical purposes. Based on the logic of Lacan himself, who defined psychoanalysis as a symptom of a concomitant era, we have to state that formal attempts to dissociate oneself from ‘ordinary reality’ cannot save one from the crucible of history, and this fatality is always present in inescapable traps of language. In the vein of psychoanalysis understood as an ‘impossible profession’, the attempt to dialecticize Freud’s thermodynamic ‘biologism’, the fiasco of the Western subject ‘after Auschwitz’ and the belief in the immanence of interpersonal communication, has turned out to be an ‘impossible project’ for Lacan. (shrink)

In this classic work, Herbert Marcuse takes as his starting point Freud's statement that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts, his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind - to an interpretation of the basic trends of western civilization, stressing the philosophical and sociological implications.

Edited by Douglas Kellner and Clayton Pierce, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation is the fifth volume of Herbert Marcuse's collected papers. Containing some of Marcuse’s most important work, this book presents for the first time his unique syntheses of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and critical social theory, directed toward human emancipation and social transformation. Within philosophy, Marcuse engaged with disparate and often conflicting philosophical perspectives - ranging from Heidegger and phenomenology, to Hegel, Marx, and Freud - to create unique philosophical insights, often overlooked (...) in favor of his theoretical and political interventions with the New Left, the subject of previous volumes. This collection assembles significant, and in some cases unknown texts from the Herbert Marcuse archives in Frankfurt, including: critiques of positivism and idealism, Dewey’s pragmatism, and the tradition of German philosophy philosophical essays from the 1930s and 1940s that attempt to reconstruct philosophy on a materialist base Marcuse’s unique attempts to bring together Freud and philosophy philosophical reflections on death, human aggression, war, and peace Marcuse’s later critical philosophical perspectives on science, technology, society, religion, and ecology. A comprehensive introduction by Douglas Kellner, Tyson Lewis and Clayton Pierce places Marcuse’s work in the context of his engagement with the main currents of twentieth century politics and philosophy. An Afterword by Andrew Feenberg provides a personal memory of Marcuse as scholar, teacher and activist, and summarizes the lasting relevance of his radical thought. (shrink)

Looks at the philosophies of Deleuze, who lived from 1925-1995, on issues such as becoming, ethics and morality, individuation, desire, and politics.

Originally published in 1984, this book broke new ground in assessing Freud as both an exemplary late-Victorian and as a pivotal figure in the creation of modern thought and culture. In his close reading of various of Freud’s theoretical and clinical texts, including two of the most famous case histories, Steven Marcus uncovers the steps in the development of Freud’s thought, the dynamics and contradictions and ‘the intellectual and emotional urgings, forces and conflicts that were at work… as the first (...) original insights and discoveries that constituted the inception of psychoanalysis as a theory, discipline of inquiry, and new kind of therapy, came suddenly, often unexpectedly and without being bidden, upon Freud’. Central to Professor Marcus’ inquiry is the relationship of Freud’s work to cultural change and to the very process of disclosure, formation and construction in the transition to modernity. Freud’s writings, and the psychoanalytic discipline of which they are the foundations, are placed in the context of their contribution to modern modes of thought, and of their influence on our notions of the centres of significance of each existence as a whole. Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis is a major contribution to our understanding of how ideas and theories become internalized into the intellectual framework of our lives and affect the way we think about the world. By moving backward and forward from pre-Freudian to post-Freudian thinkers, Professor Marcus takes us on a journey through cultural transition that is also an exploration of how the individual interacts with his own moment in history to forge new modes of consciousness. (shrink)

Drawing on notions of alienation, reification and rationalization in their book Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer explored the phenomenon of reason as such concerning the subject and the species, and diagnosed the pathologies of occidental societies. Reason provides the means for a vulnerable being to subordinate nature and serve its desire for self-preservation. However, this reason is instrumental since it objectifies the world and reifies other beings in order to render them manipulable. It is a subjective reason because it (...) promotes the subject's own ends and aims at the subject's survival at the expense of the individual's inner world of unconscious desires and instincts and the reconciliation of human beings with the external world. The myth of Ulysses is magnificantly interpreted by Horkheimer and Adorno along such anthropological lines. As I see it, this anthropology inexorably connects the advent of civilization with the reifying power of reason from the start. Against the early Frankfurt School anthropological explanation of reason, I defend the distinction between communicative and strategic rationality that presupposes a different anthropology from the Freudian one that informed the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Key Words: Adorno • alienation • critique • culture • Enlightenment • Freud • Habermas • Horkheimer • Lukács • Marcuse • paradox of reason • reason • self-preservation • subjectivity. (shrink)

A critical examination of the figure of Oedipus in psychoanalysis and Western culture as it relates to the history of society and capitalism.

Foucault's rejection of the repressive hypothesis is generally taken as a critique of Freud. Its real target is, however, the left Freudian tradition, which received its paradigmatic articulation in the work of Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse sought to show that the conflict between the repressive demands of civilization and instinctual desires of the individual didn't represent a transhistorical state of affairs, as Freud maintained. He argues, rather, that it represents a particular historical constellation that can be transcended. Foucault purports to reject (...) the entire structure in which the problem arises, that is, the conflict between the demands of civilization and bodily based desire. The thesis of this article is, however, that he doesn't reject the conflict, but simply displaces it. In his scheme, the displaced conflict takes place between the apparatus of sexuality and bodies and pleasures. Furthermore, Foucault maintains that the emancipation of bodies and pleasures from their entrapment in the apparatus of sexuality constitutes the desirable political program. The diagnosis of the situation and the suggested political remedy are, in other words, exactly parallel to Marcuse's. (shrink)

The following text is not just unpublished. There is something intimate, secret, confidential about it. It consists of a series of notes - classed from A to H - that Gilles Deleuze had entrusted to me in order that I give them to Michel Foucault. It was in 1977. Foucault had just published La Volonté de savoir, the introduction to a Histoire de la Sexualité which challenged the play of categories through which the struggles of sexual liberation reflected itself. (...) The reception of the book, poorly understood, was contemporary with a sort of crisis in Foucault, already wholly bent to the task of bringing out of himself, and converting himself to, what would become the problematic of L'usage de plaisirs and the Souci de soi. Gilles Deleuze, sensitive to what he perceives as a suffering in his friend, thus writes up these notes: therein he gives the account of his convergences and divergences with Foucault. It is not a matter of a critique, even less of a polemic, but of an invitation, entirely imbued with the sincerity of friendship, to take up again a dialogue which had been interrupted. (shrink)

Sidney Lipshires, a Marxist scholar, considered Marcuse’s shift “from Marx to Freud” problematic. Marcuse’s legitimate criticism of the conformist/adjustment elements of psychoanalytical practice seemed to Lipshires to require a recognition of theoretical weakness in Freud’s philosophical metapsychology, but this is in fact what Marcuse admires most—as explained in Eros and Civilization. Marcuse responds that Freud’s mythological material serves to recall the possibility of a nonrepressive culture! The anthropological research of Margaret Mead operates likewise. Marcuse steadfastly regards practice as political praxis, (...) aiming at changing society as a whole, and says that Mead’s work and Freud’s work has helped him bring social theory back to Marx. (shrink)

Beyond the Pleasure Principle is Freud's most philosophical and speculative work, exploring profound questions of life and death, pleasure and pain. In it Freud introduces the fundamental concepts of the "repetition compulsion" and the "death drive," according to which a perverse, repetitive, self-destructive impulse opposes and even trumps the creative drive, or Eros. The work is one of Freud's most intensely debated, and raises important questions that have been discussed by philosophers and psychoanalysts since its first publication in 1920. The (...) text is presented here in a contemporary new translation by Gregory C. Richter. Appendices trace the work's antecedents and the many responses to it, including texts by Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, Melanie Klein, Herbert Marcuse, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, among many others. (shrink)

Meditations, aphorisms, maxims, notes, and comments construct a philosophy of thought congruent with the inconsistency of our reality. Those who continue to think never return to their point of departure. —Inconsistencies These 130 short texts—aphoristic, interlacing, and sometimes perplexing—target a perennial philosophical problem: Our consciousness and our experience of reality are inconsistent, fragmentary, and unstable; God is dead, and our identity as subjects discordant. How can we establish a new mode of thought that does not cling to new gods or (...) the false security of rationality? Marcus Steinweg, as he did in his earlier book The Terror of Evidence, constructs a philosophical position from fragments, maxims, meditations, and notes, formulating a philosophy of thought that expresses and enacts the inconsistency of our reality. Steinweg considers, among other topics, life as a game (“To think is to play because no thought is firmly grounded”); sexuality (“wasteful, contradictory, and contingent”); desire (”Desire has a thousand names; It's earned none of them”); reality (“overdetermined and excessively complex”); and world (“a nonconcept”). He disposes of philosophy in one sentence (“Philosophy is a continual process of its own redefinition.”) but spends multiple pages on “A Tear in Immanence,” invoking Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and others. He describes “Wandering with Foucault” (“Thought entails wandering as well as straying into madness”) and brings together Derrida and Debord. He poses a question: “Why should a cat be more mysterious than a dog?” and later answers one: “Beauty is truth because truth is beauty.” By the end, we have accompanied Steinweg on converging trains of thought. “Thinking means continuing to think,” he writes, adding “But thinking can only pose questions by answering others.” The question of inconsistency? Asked and answered, and asked. (shrink)

This brilliant exposition of the critique of identity is a classic in contemporary philosophy and one of Deleuze's most important works. Of fundamental importance to literary critics and philosophers,Difference and Repetition develops two central concepts—pure difference and complex repetition&mdasha;and shows how the two concepts are related. While difference implies divergence and decentering, repetition is associated with displacement and disguising. Central in initiating the shift in French thought away from Hegel and Marx toward Nietzsche and Freud, _Difference and Repetition_ moves (...) deftly to establish a fundamental critique of Western metaphysics. (shrink)

How do you know what you want? Philosophers have lately developed sophisticated accounts of the practical and doxastic knowledge that are rooted in the point of view of the subject. Our ability to just say what we are doing or what we believe—that is, to say so authoritatively, but not on the basis of observation or evidence—is an aspect of our ability to reason about the good and the true. However, no analogous route to orectic self-knowledge is feasible. Knowledge of (...) desire is distinctive in being a matter of our affective response to imagined prospects. An examination of this idea yields the following thesis: I know what I want just in case the object pursued in anticipation of a certain pleasure actually yields the anticipated pleasure. (shrink)

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In this daring essay inspired by Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers are nomads who always come from the outside (...) and keep threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and "schizophrenic lines of flight," this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways. Deleuze and Guattari propose a creative and resistant ethics of becoming-imperceptible, strategizing a continuous invention of weapons on the run. An anarchic bricolage of ideas uprooted from anthropology, aesthetics, history, and military strategy, Nomadology carries out Deleuze's desire to "leave philosophy, but to leave it as a philosopher.". (shrink)

Due to the ambiguous relationship of love to the world, time is the sole immanent danger that retains its power over it.1 Time cures as much as it makes ill, and the cure is the feared outcome. Despite all breakthroughs out of normalcy, love belongs to the temps perdu. It succumbs to the damning judgment directed at this world. Yet the terrible sentence about the “paradis perdus,” which are the only true paradise, avenges both itself and the lost time. The (...) lost paradise is not the true one because somehow past desire [Lust] appears greater and clearer in memory than…. (shrink)

An old conjecture of modal logics states that every splitting of the major systems K4, S4, G and Grz has the finite model property. In this paper we will prove that all iterated splittings of G have fmp, whereas in the other cases we will give explicit counterexamples. We also introduce a proof technique which will give a positive answer for large classes of splitting frames. The proof works by establishing a rather strong property of these splitting frames namely that (...) they preserve the finite model property in the following sense. Whenever an extension Λ has fmp so does the splitting Λ/f of Λ by f. Although we will also see that this method has its limitations because there are frames lacking this property, it has several desirable side effects. For example, properties such as compactness, decidability and others can be shown to be preserved in a similar way and effective bounds for the size of models can be given. Moreover, all methods and proofs are constructive. (shrink)

How homogenous are the sources of human motivation? Textbook Humeans hold that every human action is motivated by desire, thus any heterogeneity derives from differing objects of desire. Textbook Kantians hold that although some human actions are motivated by desire, others are motivated by reason. One question in this vicinity concerns whether there are states such that to be in one is at once take the world to be a certain way and to be motivated to act: the state-question. My (...) question here is different: whether passion and reason constitute distinct sources of human motivation: the source question. In this essay, I defend an affirmative answer to the source-question while remaining neutral on the state-question. I distinguish between what I call orectic desires, which are associated with the appetites, and anorectic desires, which are associated with judgments of the good. I argue that the two sorts of desires constitute distinct sources of motivation initially on the basis of their differing epistemological profiles. Specifically, self-attributions of anorectic desires are governed by the transparency condition, self-attributions of orectic desires are not. It emerges from this discussion that the motivation for performing an action arises in very different ways from each sort of desire. This difference, in turn, is explained by their differing relations to the will. Roughly, an orectic desire influences the will, but an anorectic desire is the will. The motivation to perform some of our actions derives simply from the determination that they are to-be-done—from reason. (shrink)

It is argued that God cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The first premise is that if someone cannot be benefited, then they cannot be a fitting target of prepositional gratitude. The second premise is that God cannot be benefited. Concerning the first premise, it is argued that a necessary component of prepositional gratitude is the desire to benefit one’s benefactor. Then it is argued that such a desire is fitting only if one’s benefactor can in fact be (...) benefited. Concerning the second premise, it is noted that classical theism widely attributes blessedness to God. It is argued that if God is blessed then God necessarily has as much well-being as it is possible for God to have, and hence God cannot be benefited. Also noted are some ways in which God’s blessedness is compatible with less orthodox ideas about God’s passibility. The argument is then defended against eight objections. (shrink)

The aesthetics of masochism can be found in the 20th century across different media: pictorial and literary models influenced the history of comics, photographic art, and ultimately film. In his book ›Aus Leiden Freuden‹ (1940), Theodor Reik mentions three essential elements: 1. imagination, 2. suspense and 3. the demonstrative character of the masochistic scenario. This gives rise to the idea of masochistic performance: masochistic aesthetics need a stage on which they can unfold their imagination and the staging of suspense. Masochistic (...) performance plays with the desire for fear in the face of the threatening and sublime. Masochistic aesthetics therefore do not require the clear drasticness of pornography, but rather play with suspense, the tension of expectation in the face of the strange and dangerous – and with the pleasure of this fear. The article illustrates this approach by analyzing the film ›Titane‹ (2021) by Julia Ducournau. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Thomist and the Palamite: Reflections on The Trinity:On the Nature and Mystery of the One God*Marcus PlestedIt scarcely needs repeating that Fr. Thomas Joseph White's book is a monumental achievement. It is a splendid and paradigmatic instance of Thomistic ressourcement, amply showing the power of Aquinas's thought and work to animate, shape, and inspire Christian reflection on the past, present, and future of Trinitarian theology. While not conceived (...) as a theology "on one's knees" (6), it is certainly a work oriented on the divine wisdom. Aquinas began all of his major works with the theme of wisdom and this salutary practice is emulated by Fr. Thomas Joseph in his introduction, which nicely sets up wisdom as something of a master theme of the whole volume (even though the word "wisdom," oddly, does not appear in the index). The book is a deeply revealing account of Christian Trinitarian theology through the ages. It is profoundly helpful on the question of analogy in general and the "psychological analogy" in particular. It also contains some bracing and, I think, largely merited critique of figures such as Karl Barth and Karl Rahner, on the one hand, and Hans Urs von Balthasar and Jürgen Moltmann on the other. I also found the writing not unlike that of Aquinas—limpid, painstakingly reasoned, clearly structured, and disciplined albeit with occasional notes of delicious exuberance and the odd slightly mischievous aside. It is also, of course, a huge tome—even [End Page 541] a kind of summa in itself. I would say it was un-put-down-able were it not for its considerable weight. All in all, and speaking as a mere outsider to the Catholic Thomist tradition, I would say it is a worthy tribute to the Angelic Doctor himself.The book is of course a capital-C Catholic and specifically Thomist account of the Trinity. Even so, I was a little taken aback to see Thomas, along with various modern interlocutors, take up well over five hundred pages, and the first two thousand years of biblical, patristic, and early medieval reflection on the nature and mystery of God reduced to a mere 130 pages or so. The twelve pages bridging the eight hundred years between Augustine and Aquinas were particularly disorienting in their rapid pace. It seems to me—and I shall explain why later—a good deal of highly significant Trinitarian theology is lost sight of in the process. It can, at times, read like a bit of a theological juggernaut or perhaps the hurtling troika at the end of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls with alternative viewpoints swatted away and other ecclesial traditions scattering before the relentless perfection and implacable progress of the Thomist machine. That said, I do want to recognize the author's expressed desire to pursue Thomistic ressourcement with "collegiality" and ecumenical sensitivity (7). While he does indeed swat away many alternative viewpoints, he does try to give those "vibrant" viewpoints their due and, in general, gives far more credence to non-Catholic writers than would have been conceivable in a Thomist work written, say, a century ago. From the Orthodox standpoint, this includes some brief discussion of Sergius Bulgakov and John Zizioulas, along with occasional references to figures such as Vladmir Lossky, Dumitru Stăniloae, and John Meyendorff. Perhaps more significantly, his patristic references expressly include some of the Greek Fathers, notably the Cappadocian Fathers—although I shall query what he means by "the Cappadocian Fathers" later in this essay. St. Maximus the Confessor receives some attention, and even later Roman (commonly if inaccurately called Byzantine) theologians such as St. Gregory of Cyprus and St. Gregory Palamas get a look-in. This appeal to the Greek patristic tradition is made, I suspect, with something of an eye on the Orthodox. As Aquinas himself recommended, when speaking with "the Greeks," one must argue not only from Latin but also from Greek patristic sources. There are, nonetheless, many important elements and insights from the Eastern Christian tradition that are simply left out and one is left wishing that the reflection on Greek patristic and modern Orthodox sources had been much expanded—for the... (shrink)

Are we living in an “in-between time”? If so, what does it mean to be the “contemporary” of such a time? Starting from its consistent recurrence over different times, this article investigates the temporal-philosophical operation related to the designation of “in-between times.” It examines the function this operation assumes in thinking about time, i.e. the specific construction of time it establishes. By focusing on the functioning of _intervalle_ in Alain Badiou and _entre-temps_ in Gilles Deleuze, two contradictory relations to (...) the present conveyed in the concept of “in-between time” are discussed. The article demonstrates that for both philosophers, in-betweenness occupies a key position in their philosophical construction of time—yet, in reverse form in each case. The discussion of this contrasting mode then leads to the final question of whether there is such a thing as a fundamental in-between character that manifests itself through all times, belonging to time as such. (shrink)

This chapter includes a discussion of leadership decisions and stress. Many leaders are daily exposed to stress when they must make decisions, and there are often social reasons for this. Social standards suggest that a leader must be proactive and make decisions and not flee the situation. Conflict often creates stress in decision-making situations. It is important for leaders to understand that it is not stress in itself that leads to bad decisions, rather, bad decisions may be the result of (...) time pressure in the sense that leaders have not been able to gather enough relevant information. Thus, it is worthwhile for leaders to be able to prioritize properly in order to cope with stressful situations. In some situations, a leader chooses to delegate the decisions to his/her team and then it is important to guard against «groupthink», a phenomenon where members of a team put consensus before anything else as a result of the peer pressure. A number of methods are presented that enable leaders to avoid this phenomenon. Often leaders are involved in decision-making situations where they are forced to navigate between objectives that are in strong conflict with each other. We are talking about «decision dilemmas». These are characterized by the existence of a conflict between the top leadership's desire to control the activities and their wish to give autonomy and independence to the various units. It is important for leaders to be able to strike a balance in different dilemma situations and understand how to best manage conflicts when they arise -/- . (shrink)

This article shows how, in recent works of cultural analysis, the concept of ‘assemblage’ has been been derived from key sources of theory and put to work to provide a structure-like surrogate to express certain prominent values of a modernist sensibility in the discourse of description and analysis. Assemblage is a sort of anti-structural concept that permits the researcher to speak of emergence, heterogeneity, the decentred and the ephemeral in nonetheless ordered social life. There are other related concepts, like collage, (...) which have been used to give these values substance in research, but currently assemblage is enjoying a popularity perhaps because of the continuing fascination of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. (shrink)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Herbert Marcuse war einer der bedeutendsten Philosophen und Sozialwissenschaftler des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die sozialphilosophischen, ästhetischen und psychologischen Auseinandersetzungen seiner Zeit wurden entscheidend durch ihn geprägt. Mehr noch: kaum ein Theoretiker hatte, bei aller kritischen Distanz, solch entscheidenden Einfluß auf die emanzipatorischen politischen Bewegungen diesseits und jenseits des Atlantiks wie er. Die Titel seiner Schriften waren Programm: "Der eindimensionale Mensch" entschleierte die selbstverschuldete Unmündigkeit der Konsumbürger; "Die Permanenz der Kunst" betonte die prinzipielle Unabgegoltenheit echter Kunstwerke; "Repressive Toleranz" zeigte, daß Toleranz nicht (...) als höchster Wert eines vernünftigen Gemeinwesens gelten darf, da sie totalitären Entwicklungen Vorschub leisten kann. Die Ausgabe im Überblick: Band 1: Der deutsche Künstlerroman. Frühe Aufsätze, 594 Seiten; Band 2: Hegels Ontologie und die Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit, 368 Seiten; Band 3: Aufsätze aus der Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1934-1941, 320 Seiten; Band 4: Vernunft und Revolution. Hegel und die Entstehung der Gesellschaftstheorie, 399 Seiten; Band 5: Triebstruktur und Gesellschaft. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zu Sigmund Freud, 232 Seiten; Band 6: Die Gesellschaftslehre des sowjetischen Marxismus, 260 Seiten; Band 7: Der eindimensionale Mensch. Studien zur Ideologie der fortgeschrittenen Industriegesellschaft, 282 Seiten; Band 8: Aufsätze und Vorlesungen 1948-1969, 319 Seiten; Band 9: Konterrevolution und Revolte; Zeit-Messungen; Die Permanenz der Kunst, 241 Seiten. (shrink)

For addressing the problem of negotiating social orders in a way that protects one’s humanity, I have considered Deleuze and Guattari’s intriguing claim in Anti-Oedipus that “a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch‘. I outlined the associated principles of schizoid living developed in Anti-Oedipus via a critique that reverses the value of two Freudian concepts, namely, ”neurosis’ and ”psychosis’. I then cited some of the book’s eulogising ”praise poetry’, (...) which describes the ”schizo’ and connected it to a contemporaneous text, J.M. Coetzee’s Life and Times of Michael K, that addresses the same ethical problem of negotiating social orders. Through the activities and reflections of the novel’s protagonist, Michael K, who might be thought of as “a schizophrenic out for a walk‘, I showed that Coetzee explores various forms of resistance. He investigates the impotence of resistance as the active construction of an alternative story from the alienated position of the ”other’. I pointed out that this strategy fails because it remains within the neurotic desire to construct a coherent narrative. Similarly, I indicated that resistance fails as a gesture of pure refusal akin to schizophrenic antiproduction, because the neurotic response re-appropriates this extremity through self-serving gestures of externalisation. Finally, I pointed out how Coetzee alludes to a kind of resistance that might be called schizoid and that changes the rules of the game. In the novel, K experiments with the first and second options, but cannot make life possible, either as a servant to a social order, on his own terms, or on the absolute outside. Echoing the question posed by Deleuze and Guattari of whether the schizoid ”men of desire’ they praise exist yet, K only dreams of the third option in the novel’s final lines, which detail the thoughts of a man dying of starvation. (shrink)

The very title of Sidgwick’s great work is fascinating: the methods of ethics. We hear much—and persons a hundred years ago heard much—of the methods of science. But we hear very little of the methods of ethics. Is ethics a science? No, and Sidgwick never thought that it was. But he did think that the methods, or something of the spirit, of scientific investigation could be imported into ethical studies, with results which, though they would not necessarily be dramatic and (...) would certainly not be edifying, would nevertheless be worthwhile. Sidgwick himself characterized his work as “essentially an attempt to introduce precision of thought into a subject usually treated in a too loose and popular way”. “I have thought that the predominance in the minds of moralists of a desire to edify has impeded the real progress of ethical science; and that this would be benefited by an application to it of the same disinterested curiosity to which we chiefly owe the great discoveries of physics”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 30.2 (2006) 450-470 MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]Romantic Love: A Literary Universal?Jonathan Gottschall Washington and Jefferson College (JG)Marcus Nordlund * Göteborg University (MN)ITo love someone romantically is—at least according to innumerable literary works, much received wisdom, and even a gradually coalescing academic consensus—to experience a strong desire for union with someone who is deemed entirely unique. It is to idealize this person, to think constantly about (...) him or her, and to discover that one's own life priorities have changed dramatically. It is to care deeply for that person's well-being and to feel pain or emptiness when he or she is absent.But is this intense emotional experience a universal experience, something that is characteristically and quintessentially human, or is it merely a sociocultural construct that belongs to a particular time and place? On this point there is less agreement, both within and between different academic disciplines. The audacious question we want to raise in the pages that follow is whether literature—or more specifically, a large-scale, multiple-coder content analysis of thousands of folk tales drawn from different parts of the planet—can contribute something to this difficult question about love, culture, and human nature.Let us first look briefly at the theoretical problem that we aim to address. A widespread view among literary scholars and social scientists over the last decades has been that romantic love is a social construction specific to Western culture. This is part of a relentless skepticism [End Page 450] toward assumptions that important categories of human psychology and emotion—romantic and parental love, gender, sexual orientation, and so on—are "natural" rather than constructed. This position is often, if not always, linked to an ideological concern to demystify (or at least problematize) what is perceived as an essentially destructive or oppressive emotion or belief. Taking her cue from Simone de Beauvoir, Marilyn Friedman gives no less than ten reasons why it may be problematic for women to fall in love with men. 1Of course, no argument of any kind can be strictly ideological in nature since it always involves empirical assumptions—either explicit or implicit—about the nature of things. For example, the psychoanalyst E. S. Persons opines that the "best evidence that romantic love is not hard-wired into the emotional repertoire of humanity but is a cultural construct is the fact that there are so many cultures in which it is virtually absent." 2 Another frequent argument for love's constructedness has been that "there is no definition that describes love throughout the ages or across cultures." 3In some literary-critical accounts, it is even argued that romantic love is a cultural invention that can be traced back with precision to the courtly troubadour culture of twelfth-century France. 4 According to yet another school, represented by the influential literary theorist Jonathan Culler, "the notion of romantic love (and its centrality to the lives of individuals) is arguably a massive literary creation." 5While the social constructivist position on romantic love typically involves a strong commitment to cultural specificity, a weaker version is held even by some cognitive theorists who grant more to biology and panhuman traits. From the perspective of their communicative theory of emotion, Philip Johnson-Laird and Keith Oatley argue that the "components [of romantic love] exist separately in different societies, but their integration into a recognizable complex is a cultural accomplishment [by the West]." 6At the other end of the romantic love continuum we find those who argue that this emotion belongs to a universal human nature: or, more specifically, that it can be attributed to specialised neural circuits whose ultimate purpose is to enhance reproductive success. Not surprisingly, this has been a favorite position among evolutionary psychologists, and it has recently received some support from neuroscientific studies.For example, the neuroscientists Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki claim to have uncovered a "functionally specialised system" that lights up in fMRI (magnetic resonance) scans of brains whose owners claim to... (shrink)

This book will gather contributions from international scholars with the aim of exploring the political reflection of Deleuze-Guattari’s and Foucault’s critical encounter with psychoanalytic thought: their possible connections, their divergences and the fields of reflection that this encounter opens, the problems and debates that lead Foucault and Deleuze to engage with psychoanalysis.

The moment when a person’s actual relationships fall short of desired relationships is commonly identified as the etiological moment of chronic loneliness, which can lead to physical and psychological effects like depression, worse recovery from illness and increased mortality. But, this etiology fails to explain the nature and severe impact of loneliness. Here, we use philosophical analysis and neuroscience to show that human beings develop and maintain our world-picture (our sense of what is true, important, and good) through joint attention (...) and action, motivated by friendship, in the Aristotelian sense of “other selves” who share a sense of the true and the good, and desire the good for each other as much as for themselves. The true etiological event of loneliness is the moment one’s world-picture becomes unshared. The pathogenesis is a resultant decay of our world-picture, with brain and behavior changes following as sequelae. (shrink)

Common sense explanations of human action are often framed in terms of an agent's beliefs and desires. Recent widely received views also take believing and desiring as attitudes of an agent to linguistic or quasi‐linguistic entities. It is here claimed that such a narrow view of cognitive attitudes is not supportable, since even among lingual non‐verbal responses are often overriding evidence for belief and desire, even where they run counter to sincere verbal assents. The view is also curiously non naturalistic (...) in that it disallows ascribing beliefs and desires altogether to non‐lingual and pre‐lingual. In the present paper a “common sense” explanation of action in accordance with the triad Desire, Belief, Action, is seen as a useful phenomenological “theory” provided that language centrality is not taken as essential. (shrink)

Resumo: Este artigo busca obter contribuições de Jacques Lacan para a educação, não em aspectos técnicos e metodológicos, mas no que se refere à constituição da subjetividade dos professores. A primeira seção analisa as reflexões lacanianas sobre a linguagem, assumindo seu vínculo com a Sofística, de um lado, seu distanciamento ante as teorizações de Aristóteles, de outro, e adotando Montaigne como intermediário para dialogar com Lacan. A segunda seção assume Freud como ponto de partida para entender o conceito lacaniano de (...) angústia, visando revelar seu potencial criativo mediante a noção de sublimação. O artigo propõe a performance como linguagem artística capaz de atuar sobre a subjetividade dos professores, o que só pode ser realizado com a adoção de uma pedagogia disposta a romper com os parâmetros vigentes na atualidade, cuja inclinação mercantilista faz da educação uma ferramenta voltada à inserção dos estudantes no mercado e vê os educadores como peças de uma engrenagem sem poder de decisão sobre si mesmos. Palavras-chaves: Lacan; Psicanálise; Sofística; Trabalho Docente Performance as logos-pharmakon: Lacan for teachers Abstract: This article seeks to draw contributions from Jacques Lacan to education, not in technical and methodological aspects, but in terms of the constitution of teachers’ subjectivity. The first section analyzes Lacan’s reflections on language, assuming firstly its link with Sophistry, secondly its distance from Aristotle’s theories and finally adopting Montaigne as an intermediary to dialogue with Lacan. The second section takes Freud as a starting point to understand the Lacanian concept of anguish, aiming to reveal its creative potential through the notion of sublimation. The article proposes performance as an artistic language capable of acting on the subjectivity of teachers, something that can only be achieved with the adoption of a pedagogy that breaks up with the parameters in force today, which tend towards mercantilism in making education a tool aimed at the insertion of students in the market and in seeing educators as cogs in a gear with no decision-making power over themselves. Keywords: Lacan; Psychoanalysis; Sophistry; Teaching Work Performance como logos-pharmakon: Lacan para professores Resumen: Este artículo busca obtener aportes de Jacques Lacan a la educación, no en aspectos técnicos y metodológicos, sino en cuanto a la constitución de la subjetividad de los docentes. El primer apartado analiza las reflexiones de Lacan sobre el lenguaje, asumiendo su vinculación con la Sofística, por un lado, su alejamiento de las teorías aristotélicas, por otro, y adoptando a Montaigne como intermediario para dialogar con Lacan. La segunda sección toma a Freud como punto de partida para comprender el concepto lacaniano de angustia, con el objetivo de revelar su potencial creativo a través de la noción de sublimación. El artículo propone la performance como un lenguaje artístico capaz de actuar sobre la subjetividad de los docentes, lo que sólo puede hacerse con la adopción de una pedagogía dispuesta a romper con los parámetros vigentes hoy, cuya inclinación mercantilista hace de la educación una herramienta dirigida a la inserción de estudiantes en el mercado y ve a los educadores como engranajes sin poder de decisión sobre sí mismos. Palabras clave: Lacan; Psicoanálisis; Sofistería; Trabajo Docente Data de registro: 06/07/2022 Data de aceite: 22/03/2023. (shrink)

Embora a distância temporal entre Agostinho e Freud possa apresentar dificuldades no que se refere a aproximações conceituais, a tentativa deste artigo é reconhecer alguns conjuntos significantes que se estruturam em torno principalmente das noções de memória e de inconsciente. A finalidade de tal procedimento é identificar no que poderíamos chamar de uma antropologia, seja ela agostiniana ou freudiana, elementos para a crítica do sujeito da modernidade. Assim, serāo examinados o conceito de inconsciente freudiano e o de memória agostiniana e (...) a sua referência a conteúdos latentes da mente, para em seguida ser pontuado o diferencial da memória agostiniana como sede de sabedoria e de transcendência, ideia ausente na teoria freudiana. Enquanto em Freud o sujeito fica desabrigado de si, não sendo senhor da própria casa, em Agostinho verifica-se a saída-de-si em direção a um ‘eu’ mais que ‘eu’. Ambos os autores se dedicam a investigar dimensões ocultas e desconhecidas da subjetividade, buscando lhes atribuir alguma inteligibilidade. Com isso explicitam-se elementos para uma crítica dessa “invenção “da modernidade, isto é, o sujeito tido como autossuficiente e autocentrado. (shrink)

Many democracies use geographic constituencies to elect some or all of their legislators. Furthermore, many people regard this as desirable in a noncomparative sense, thinking that local constituencies are not necessarily superior to other schemes but are nevertheless attractive when considered on their own merits. Yet, this position of noncomparative constituency localism is now under philosophical pressure as local constituencies have recently attracted severe criticism. This article examines how damaging this recent criticism is, and argues that within limits, noncomparative constituency (...) localism remains philosophically tenable despite the criticisms. The article shows that noncomparative constituency localism is compelling in the first place because geographic constituencies foster partisan voter mobilisation, and practices of constituency service help to sustain deliberation among constituents and within the legislature and promote the realisation of equal opportunity for political influence. The article further argues that it is unwarranted to criticise geographic constituencies for being biased against geographically dispersed voter groups, for causing vote-seat disproportionality, and for being vulnerable to gerrymandering. The article also discusses the criticisms that local constituencies may pose risks of inefficiency and injustice in resource allocation decisions, may lead legislators to neglect the common good, and may limit citizens’ control over the political agenda. Whilst conceding that these objections may be valid, the article argues that they do not outweigh the diverse and normatively weighty considerations speaking in favour of noncomparative constituency localism. Finally, the article’s analysis is defended against several variants of the charge that it exaggerates the benefits of geographic constituencies. (shrink)

Why were luminaries of European philosophy like Bergson, Cassirer, Heidegger, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus and Sartre, even Marx systematically excluded from the North Atlantic canon of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Why did Anglo-American university philosophy departments for the most part lump together the philosophical schools to which many of these thinkers belonged --Phenomenology, Existentialism, Structuralism, Constructivism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism -- as Continental Philosophy. All were then dismissed as belonging more in literature and psychology departments than philosophy proper. That same (...) worldview categorized Americans Emerson and Thoreau as well as Spaniards Ortega y Gassett and Unamuno (along with Montaigne and Isaiah Berlin) as essayists, not philosophers. French Existentialists Sartre and Camus? They clearly belonged in the literature departments (just ask the Nobel committee!). Freud’s theory of the superego? Excluded from epistemology and relegated to the psychology department to keep company with Koehler’s Gestalt Psychology and Husserl’s Phenomenology. Most likely because his reductionism bottomed out at the scale of transactions on material production, Karl Marx too was shunted into the political science and economics departments, where Marcuse, Lacan, Gramsci, and Althusser would keep him company a few years later. Comte’s ideas were safely ensconced in a new discipline, sociology, with an even newer subdiscipline, sociology of science, carved out a few years later for Robert Merton and Bruno Latour. More recently, the rest of the philosophical lot (Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault, to name the most prominent) were likewise dismissed along with Whitehead’s Process philosophy, and for the same reason: they were thought to belong more to psychology or sociology than philosophy proper Why? The monograph argues that the dismissals can be explained in terms of a generalized rejection of relations of interdependence and the context-dependent constraints that generate such mutualism. (shrink)