Overdetermination

The Deconstructivist Laclau Paula Biglieri (bio) and Gustavo Guille (bio) Ernesto Laclau (1935–2014) became famous within the academic field when he published, together with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics in 1985. This text brought fresh air into the field of radical politics not only because it challenged the overwhelming number of conservatives who were currently delighted in celebrating the failure of the socialist project, and thus the unsuccessfulness of Marxist theory, but also because this theoretical intervention made a difference: it reoriented the political leftist debates that, up until then, had been at an impasse. This theoretical intervention was later designated as the starting point of post-Marxism. Laclau was therefore characterized as a post-Marxist thinker, or as the creator of a new kind of theory of hegemony. However, he was never introduced as a “decontructivist” author. This is quite peculiar if we consider that in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, in an enormous gesture—which could be interpreted as a work about their Marxist heritage—the authors deconstructed Marxist theory in such a vast way that they ended up disintegrating its foundations. Once they recognized that antagonism inhabits the heart of the subject and any objectivity, the assertion that there could be a final, coherent resolution without any remainder proved absurd. Thus they affirmed that enigmatic phrase “society is impossible”—a metaphor to say that society lacks the ultimate foundations from [End Page 1] which the totality of a partial process could be established. The inevitable conclusion was that it is no longer possible to hold on to a view that the subject of history could be determined a priori (the proletariat) and that it has a preestablished destiny (the reconciled society of communism). Yet the authors persisted with the idea of social change and antagonism, but this time without any possibility of reaching a dialectical resolution. Moreover, they insisted on the idea of emancipation, which would become a plural term—emancipations—leaving aside any possibility of an eschatological ending. From then onward, and taking into account these elements of perseverance, Laclau’s theoretical and political target became to make politics thinkable again. Politics—or, better said, hegemony—as the form of the political, antagonism, dislocation, and his last response to think of politics, that is, populism, became a key concept of his theoretical development. We could say that Laclau had a “political thought,” in order to contrast with the idea that his work was a “political philosophy,” in the sense that Laclau would have never accepted that politics was a mere sub-system of philosophy, that is to say, that politics would just refer to the institutionalized forms of interchange. For Laclau, politics went far beyond that; there was also “the political,” which had an entirely decisive dimension. In this sense, Laclau’s perspective is close to Derridean deconstruction inasmuch as Derrida always questioned the limits established by political philosophy and political theory regarding what has to be examined and what not as politics. As Ana Penchaszadeh and Emmanuel Biset have written: “Deconstruction questions the disciplinary boundaries that make political philosophy a defined area within philosophy, with a clear object to be examined and also a clear and distinct concept of politics” (2013, 10). In any case, the deconstructivist Laclau did not finish his task once he had deconstructed Marxist theory. We can say, in a way, that he continued with a deconstructivist gesture over his entire work, even when he presented his notion of populism. It is worth mentioning that in Laclau’s work the deconstructive face is [End Page 2] characterized by a critical or destructive aspect, while when constructing his theoretical and political proposal the deconstructive face is supplemented by psychoanalysis (in its Freudian-Lacanian version). In this article we will only focus on his deconstructivist gesture, which can be divided into two key moments: first, the deconstruction of classical Marxist theory and the radicalization of Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony; and second, the deconstruction of the idea of populism and its radicalization. The Deconstruction of Classical Marxism Deconstruction, at least as developed by Derrida, is closely linked to the work of revisiting the Western philosophical tradition...

In their groundbreaking Hegemony and socialist strategy (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe develop a new account of radical politics in which the subjective construction of hegemony establishes political conditions, not the objective historical stages and class contexts of traditional Hegelian Marxism. On this basis, they forcefully justify the ‘identity politics’ of contemporary women’s, African-American, gay, and working class groups and organisations and oppose both the hegemony of the new right and the ‘classism’ and revolutionary orientation of the radical left. In their later work, they elaborate their accounts of hegemony and move in new directions. In On populist reason (2005) and The rhetorical foundations of society (2014), Laclau draws on poststructuralist discourse or rhetoric as well as notions of populism or the masses to show that hegemony involves what he terms antagonism, frontiers or we/they oppositions, equivalential logics, and other elements. By contrast, in On the political (2005) and Agonistics: thinking the world politically (with Wagner, 2013), Mouffe elaborates the notion of the fissured subject which, as she and Laclau argued in Hegemony, was constituted by the antagonisms of diverse social movements or the dislocation of social structures; however, her new accounts of the antagonisms or, as she says, ‘agonisms’ dividing the political field forcefully oppose universal norms of rationality or democracy in order to establish a genuine pluralism on a national and a global scale.

Sigmund Freud (1856‒1939) was the founder of psychoanalysis. First engaged in neuropathology and neurophysiology, he spent some time in Paris with Jean‐Martin Charcot who treated hysterical patients with hypnosis and suggestion. Back in Vienna, Freud and his mentor, Josef Breuer, concentrated on studying and treating hysterical patients and developed a new method of psychotherapy, the cathartic method. Freud identified sexual trauma as the most important causal factor for neuroses and developed a theory to explain the neurotic symptoms resulting from these traumas. Later, he abandoned the traumatic etiology and favored the view that the (sexual) drive or instinct was the central force in human development, including normal as well as “deviant” behaviors, dominated by unconscious processes. Sexuality plays the major role in his concepts of psychic development as well as his writings on cultural, political, and other topics.

Ernesto Laclau has blazed a unique trail in political theory and philosophy since the early 1970s. In so doing, he has articulated a range of philosophical and theoretical currents into a coherent alternative to mainstream models and practices of conducting social and political science. The editors have focused on work in three key areas: Post-Marxist Political Theory: Discourse, Hegemony, Signification Laclau has developed an original conception of post-Marxist political theory that is grounded on a materialist theory of discourse. The latter is constructed from a range of theoretical and philosophical sources, including poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, linguistic theory and post-analytical philosophy. The centerpiece of this approach is the category of hegemony, which develops Antonio Gramsci’s seminal contribution to Marxist theory, and is in turn connected to a web of related concepts, including articulation, dislocation, the logics of equivalence and difference, political identification, myth and social imaginary. These ideas have informed a number of empirical and theoretical studies associated with the Essex School of Discourse Theory. Analyzing Populism A central concern of Laclau’s writings has been the question of populism, both in Latin America where hebegan his interrogation of the phenomenon (especially the experience of Peronism), and then in his engagement with the new social movements and socialist strategy more generally. The concept of populism becomes a general way of exploring the primacy of politics in society. Critical Engagements Laclau is first and foremost an engaged intellectual who has consistently sought to theorize contemporary events and reality, and to debate with the leading intellectual figures of the day, with respect to questions of political principle and strategy. His recent debates with Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, published in 2011 (London: Verso), exemplify this critical ethos. He continues to elaborate his approach by challenging and articulating related approaches, and by situating his work in connection to the democratic Left.

This article initially discusses reasons why Freud researchers turn to critical realism since this is what led me to compare causality in the two traditions in the first place. Three arguments on causality follow. First, it is argued that Freud's analyses of unconscious processes merit closer attention by critical realists, focusing on the relation between causal unconscious processes and rationality, and causal unconscious processes and social change. It may be objected that this does not concern the discussion of causality proper, to which I would reply that what we consider to be causally efficacious ultimately is relevant to our conception of causality. The second argument, which is the centrepiece, outlines Freud's conception of causality, his idea of overdetermination (complication of causes) and his treatment of motives and reasons as causes. His notions of causality are compared to those of critical realism. Freud's idea of retroactive causality is discussed in relation to delayed causality in critical realism and the idea of disembedded space-time components. Finally, Freud's concept of determinism and the related concepts of repetition and chance are discussed and compared to ubiquity determinism in critical realism and the distinctions between causal and non-causal correlations and necessary and accidental sequences of events. While the first argument concerns presuppositions for the discussion of causality in psychoanalysis and its relevance for critical realism, the third concerns implications and/or applications of the two views on causality. It is my contention that the second argument needs to be placed in context of the other two in order for the two conceptions of causality to be understood adequately and most revealingly compared.

The contributions of neurobiology and infant research have greatly extended our understanding of unconscious processes. We are still driven by unconscious forces that we cannot control, but those forces represent unconscious perceptual and interpretive processes and cannot be viewed simply as instincts under repression as Freud believed. This paper reexamines the Freudian dynamic unconscious and the problem of agency in the light of these newer findings of neuroscience.

Psychoanalytic readings of narrative fiction advance the idea that the novel's most important feature is its depiction of human subjectivity. The psychoanalysts who have most influenced literary studies believe that reading, whether clinical or literary, reveals the unconscious dimension of the human mind in particular. Scholars of the novel who employ psychoanalytic theory, accordingly, presuppose that the principal function of the novel is to describe the unconscious. Psychoanalytic study of the novel can be said to have originated in 1907 by none other than the founder of psychoanalysis himself, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), but psychoanalytic theory did not become established as a preferred method for analyzing novels until the mid‐1970s, following the introduction of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's (1901–81) theories into literary studies. In what follows, I will explain why Lacan had such a tremendous influence on novel theory. Lacan is known for his revision of the Freudian conception of the unconscious, and this change in psychoanalytic theory turns out to have overlapped, historically and theoretically, with narratologist Roland Barthes's (1915–80) influential revision of the idea of the author. In the 1970s Lacanian theory was taken up by literary scholars interested in Barthes, and in combination, psychoanalytic theory and narratology created a significant conceptual approach to understanding the novel as a genre (see novel theory , 20TH a). Two of the three psychoanalytic readings Dorothy Hale identifies as crucial to the development of novel theoryby literature scholars Peter Brooks (“Turning the Screw of Interpretation”) and Shoshana Felman (“Freud's Masterplot: Questions of Narrative”)were published in Felman's 1977 collection, Literature and Psychoanalysis . Of these early psychoanalytic readings influenced by Lacan, I will focus on Brooks's to demonstrate the particular version of psychoanalytic theory that would qualify it as a movement in novel theory.

O tema do presente estudo é a ideia de democracia e o lugar do conflito e do consenso nos modelos democráticos. Buscou-se confrontar os modelos democráticos deliberativos, propostos por John Rawls e Jürgen Habermas, ao modelo agonístico desenvolvido por Chantal Mouffe e Ernesto Laclau, para responder ao seguinte problema: os modelos de democracia deliberativa são sustentáveis, em face das críticas que lhes foram endereçadas por Chantal Mouffe e Ernesto Laclau na formulação de seu modelo agonístico? Para tanto, foi adotado o método de pesquisa hermenêutico, que propõe a compreensão do problema e de suas possíveis respostas, inserindo nesse processo a subjetividade do pesquisador. O objetivo foi o de responder se os modelos de democracia deliberativa se sustentam ou sucumbem às críticas agonísticas, o que enseja a opção por um dos dois modelos. Concluiu-se, após análise do tema, que a proposta democrática agonística falha em suas críticas às concepções deliberativas, por vários motivos, que iniciam com a incompreensão dessas teorias, passam por contradições internas à argumentação mesma e desembocam na possibilidade de um sistema democrático avesso às conquistas liberais.

Reviewed by: The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, and: The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?, and: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, and: Cosmopolitanism Christian Moraru Slavoj Zizek. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London and New York: Verso, 2000. vi + 409 pp.; Slavoj Zizek. The Fragile Absolute or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for?. London and New York: Verso, 182 pp. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London and New York: Verso, 2000; Cosmopolitanism. Guest eds., Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Dipesh Chakrabarty. Public Culture 12..3 (Fall 2000). The Zizek industry is clearly a growth one as the three titles recently put out by Verso show. Two of them, The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, came out in Wo Es War, a series edited by Zizek himself. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, the third one, features several interventions by Zizek and was published in the Phronesis series edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. All of them are part of a broader project of reinventing politics in the post-Cold War era—or the “global age”—in which, as Laclau and Mouffe acknowledge in the brief description of their series, old categories such as “Left” and “Right” seem, to many, fairly irrelevant. To paraphrase Zizek’s own marxian paraphrase in his “Introduction” to The Ticklish Subject, the specter of this age haunts Zizek and practically everybody else in these books, including, as one would expect, the contributors to Public Culture’s special topic issue, Cosmopolitanism. Regarding the latter, let me mention for now Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai” (627–651). For, it seems to me, the critic gives us here, as he has in Modernity at Large, a balanced account of globalization as driven by capital but also by cultural “particularities” that take advantage of capital flows. In other words, one thing that I admire in [End Page 205] Appadurai’s contribution—as well as in Mignolo’s “The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”—is the effort to read the global, an essentially ambiguous, multifaceted phenomenon. Unlike Appadurai and despite the intricate argument developed throughout hundreds of dense pages, Zizek seems to already know what globalization is all about. This prescience is not truly surprising given the predictable paradigm within which he operates—a paradigm of predictability, too, in that, chances are, his mix of Lacanian and marxist analysis “uncovers” invariably the logic of Capital. The issues Zizek raises, though, are certainly pressing. I think he risks “misreading” them (unavoidably, perhaps? does he “know what he is doing”?) as to “identify” all over the place the long hand of Capital—an obsessing, absolute Signifier and Signified collapsed into both phenomenon and meaning thereof simultaneously. But he does a good job of underscoring the global urgency of the problems he brings to the fore. The Ticklish Subject’s objective, for instance, anachronistic as it may sound—“[t]his book thus endeavours to reassert the Cartesian subject” (2)—provides an opportunity to take not only on Hegel and Heidegger but also on Badiou, Balibar, Rancière, and Laclau, and it is through a critique of their work that Zizek distinguishes between a certain type of universality and “capitalist globalism.” What happens in Part II, however, is a “universalization” of capital—it turns out, American capital—as the agent of global society at the expense of any cultural considerations that might give us a more complicated and perhaps encouraging picture. As in the last section on the book, which takes to task risk theorists such as Beck and Giddens, this Part also develops, or rather assumes, not only a certain definition of globalism but also of postmodernism. This last one, along with “deconstruction,” “multiculturalism,” and its various struggles along gender, ethnicity, or race lines are seized as accomplices—and unwittingly so (“they do not know what they are doing”)—to globalist (read capital) expansion. Now, in his book, Zizek often refers to the unholy alliance between the extremities of the political spectrum...

This article sheds light on the relationship between inner and outer freedom in a rather repressive social system. In the search for individual agency, it contrasts theories of European liberalism - as impressively described by Michel Foucault - with the collective organisation of South Asian societies. With the aforementioned as well as Hannah Arendt and bell hooks, the question of the meaning and purpose of political action is raised. The subject as the origin and goal of political action is located differently in the opposing social systems described here. Nevertheless, the retreat of the political subject into the private sphere opens up the possibility of subverting the public relations of subordination and oppression, as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau impressively demonstrated in Hegemony and socialist strategy: towards a radical democratic politics.

Freud, Sigmund (1856–1939)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes This comment has been passed on, from Freud to Jung to Lacan, who uses it in his paper ‘The Freudian Thing’. See: Jacques Lacan, ‘The Freudian Thing’, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 128. Despite extensive searching through the published letters and diaries of Jung and Freud around this time period, I can find no other reference to this comment other than Lacan's claim in ‘The Freudian Thing’ that he had it ‘from Jung's own mouth’, p. 128. Jacques Lacan, ‘The Freudian Thing’, p. 128. The infectiousness of the Oedipus complex, its reception and its relation to the plague of Oedipus the King is discussed in considerable depth in my doctoral thesis, entitled But I Ain't Dead: Legacies of Plague from Defoe to Romero. Sigmund Freud, ‘On Dreams’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V: 1900–1901, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963), p. 642. In German: Sigmund Freud, Gesammelte Werke II/III Die Traumdeutung, Über den Traum (London: Imago Publishing, 1942), p. 655. This text is used for references to Die Traumdeutung [The Interpretation of Dreams] as well. Where clear, all page numbers will be given in parenthesis within the text. Where the German or French is provided, the page reference follows its English counterpart, separated by a forward slash. In their turn, these typical dreams lead back to plague: the section of The Interpretation entitled ‘Dreams of the Death of Persons of Whom the Dreamer is Fond’ is also where Freud first describes (but does not yet name) the Oedipus complex. As part of this, he gives an account of Sophocles' play and makes mention of the Theban plague. See: Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, PFL 4, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 363. Antonin Artaud, ‘The Theatre and the Plague’, Theatre and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), p.18. Where the French is given: Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres Complètes IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1978). There is a question of telepathy here; a telepathic communication between plague and man. Freud was interested in the possibilities of telepathy and its potential role in dreams. In a very short comment upon occult dreams, Freud proposes to discuss prophetic dreams, which he repudiates strongly, and telepathic dreams. However, he does not discuss telepathic dreams but instead an incident upon which a fortune teller predicted a future for a woman which didn't come true. Freud is interested because the numbers and details of the prophecy were not without significance in the woman's life even though the prophecy was incorrect. He suggests that ‘a strong wish on the part of the questioner – the strongest unconscious wish, in fact, of her whole emotional life and the motive force of her impending neurosis – had made itself manifest to the fortune-teller by being directly transferred to him while his attention was being distracted by the performances he was going through’. Interesting, in the light of the discussion to come, Freud calls this ‘thought-transference’. Freud's attempt to banish prophetic dreams brings him back to the (future orientated) wish and a scene of prophecy and infectious transference. See: Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Additional Notes on Dream Interpretation as a Whole’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV: 1923–1925, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis, 1961), p. 138. Discussing Freud on dreams and telepathy, Jacques Derrida comments, ‘in its purity, the concept of telepathic dream appeals to the perception of something external with regard to which psychic life would behave in a “receptive and passive” manner’. This brings us back to Artaud's suggestion. See: Jacques Derrida, ‘“Telepathy”’, Deconstruction: A Reader, ed. Martin McQuillan (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 518. Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, Tome I (Paris: Mouton, 1975), pp. 233–5. Hélène Cixous seems to recognize the possibility of psychic infection in dreams when she writes ‘dreams have brought me news of a few virosignifiers’ in ‘The Unforseeable’, The Oxford Literary Review, 26 (2004), p. 178. This is again what is asserted in the short paper, ‘Some Additional Notes on Dream Interpretation as a Whole’ and implied in the even shorter ‘A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled’, which attempts, in a rather convoluted way, to show how what a patient deemed to be a prophetic dream was in fact the resurfacing of a wish from her past; nothing, Freud is sure, but a wish fulfillment which had disguised itself and been retrospectively identified as prophetic. See: Sigmund Freud, ‘A Premonitory Dream Fulfilled’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. V: 1900–1901, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1958), pp. 623–5. I thank Susanne Sklepek for assisting with my German translation throughout this chapter. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stamford CA: Stamford University Press, 1995), p. 116. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, in their authoritative guide to the terminology of psychoanalysis, note that Freud uses Wunsch more frequently than the terms Begierde or Lust, which evoke ‘the notion of desire’, p. 482.The whole problem of transference from one language to another is raised by this little grouping. In English there is an obvious difference in nuance and usage between desire and lust but they both share a sexual connotation, whereas wish usually does not. In French, Laplanche and Pontalis's language, there is only désir, since wish does not have a cognate. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1988), pp. 481–3. Maud Ellmann makes a similar point in her introduction to the collection of essays entitled Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: ‘Yet Freud came to realize that a gut resistance to psychoanalysis often signified a deeper recognition of its dangers than a prompt assimilation of its principles. A little indigestion was a healthy sign’. Maud Ellmann, ed., Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (London and New York: Longman, 1994), p. 1. She goes on to observe that Freud extended this to his whole oeuvre: ‘Freud tended to regard all criticism of his theories as a symptom of resistance to unwelcome truths’, p. 2. The dictionary was begun by the Grimm brothers in 1838 but not fully completed until 1960. Freud, ‘On Dreams’, p. 650. Strachey's translation renders this clause: ‘in complete contrast to the desires which were now plaguing me in my dreams’. The slight difference in tense, coupled with the insertion ‘now’, lose the sense of a repeated and continual activity which the original German carries. Ernest Jones, The Life and Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume I: The Young Freud, 1856–1900 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1954). A more literal translation renders this: ‘One should never let anything escape from oneself, take what one can get even if a small wrong is done alongside; one should miss no opportunity: life is so short and death is inevitable’ [Man soll sich nichts entgehen lassen, nehmen, was man haben kann, auch wenn ein kleines Unrecht dabei mitläuft; man soll keine Gelegenheit versäumen, das Leben ist so kurz, der Tod unvermeidlich], p. 213. See: Sigmund Freud, ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Art and Literature, PFL 14, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 134, where Freud links playing to phantasy and then to dreaming, stating of the underlying wishes: ‘These motivating wishes vary according to the sex, character and circumstances of the person who is having the phantasy; but they fall naturally into two groups. They are either ambitious wishes, which serve to elevate the subject's personality; or they are erotic ones’. Translations of these lines vary. David Luke translates them as ‘Suck on at Wisdom's breasts, you'll find / She daily grows more sweet and kind’ in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. David Luke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 57. An earlier translation renders them very poorly as: ‘So you will suck the breasts of learning / With rising appetite and yearning’ in Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Faust Part One, trans. Walter Arndt (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1976), p. 45. A more literal rendition would be ‘So with every day that passes / you will lust more and more after the breasts of wisdom’. My thanks to Keston Sutherland for assistance with this couplet. Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 149. Jacques Derrida, ‘To Speculate – “On Freud”‘, The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 339. Sigmund Freud, ‘Analysis Terminable and Interminable’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXIII, ed. And trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1964), p. 248. The other ‘impossible profession’ listed by Freud is politics. Christopher Bollas, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 11. Freud, of course, maintained that the dream work, which Bollas believes is the model for all unconscious activity, does not think: ‘It [the dream work] does not think, calculate or judge in any way at all; it restricts itself to giving things a new form’, Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation, p. 650. Nevertheless, Freud does allow that dreams themselves ‘are a particular form of thinking’, Freud, The Interpretation, p. 650. The basic problem with Bollas's theory here for strict Freudians is the looseness with which he appropriates and deploys psychoanalytic terms: ‘dream’ is something the analyst can do while awake and listening with concentration; ‘unconscious thinking’ appears to be accessible, and in quite coherent ways, to conscious thought.

Richard D. Chessick: Descent Into Darkness, the Psychodynamics of Mental Illness, XLIBRIS, Bloomington, IN, 2011, 261 pp. $9.99 (in e-Pub format), ISBN: 978-1-45353-049-8 Descent Into Darkness, the Psychodynamics of Mental Illness, is a Greek Tragedy in a contemporary setting. The trip to Turkey by Martin, a bereaved psychoanalyst suffering the loss of his wife and the unrequited love of J, a former patient, is a metaphor for the tragedy of his life as well as the decay of Western Civilization - a journey into the Abyss of Nietzsche. This is a didactic novel, the purpose of which is to teach psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, utilizing relationships common to human everyday experience, to interested persons. Thus, this book represents a new contribution in psychoanalysis. The author presents discussions among proponents of differing theoretical orientation using the voices of the participants in his travel group. The richness of the material is supplemented by substantially cogent discussions of philosophy, such as Spinoza's perspective of psychodynamic issues as discussed in his work Ethics. This is the underlying idea of Descent Into Darkness, the human lack of power in moderating and checking the emotions. The material is representative of how human beings function as a reflection of unconscious intrapsychicphenomena. This is accomplished both didactically and illustratively in the context of the behavior of the individual group members. The issues are of universal human significance with regard to a humanistic perspective as well as the very survival of civilization. The various philosophical viewpoints are conveyed through discussion and the dramatic interaction of the protagonists. Martin, the tragic hero of this novel, leads a group consisting of mosdy psychoanalysts on a tour of Turkey. He obtains a travel grant and muses ... as middle age waned and old age loomed up, that we are not to be distinguished from animals by any capacity for rational insight into nature (p. 17). We differ from animals only in degree and not in kind. The idea of an intellectual tour of Turkey arose because it cradles the remains of civilizations from the very beginning of human history that we have information about, to the present time. This might lend itself to a comparison of the development of the psychic apparatus and its archaic origins. Martin wished to discuss the various stages of civilization and by introducing archaeology to demonstrate Freud's concept of the unconscious as a buried city. In Turkey a number of civilizations from the most archaic to the most modern are mixed together and must live together with compromises, thus an illustration of Freud's conception. Arnold Modell, in his book Object Love and Reality (1968), discusses the analogy between the historical development of society's gradual acceptance of an inanimate, unmoved world, and the developmental process in the individual that permits the acceptance of reality. In Totem and Taboo (1918), Freud showed magical thinking to be common to both the inner world of modern man and the sodai institutions of prehistoric man. Magical thinking serves analogous functions in neurotic symptoms and primitive social institutions. …

During my early introduction to architecture I found that I was motivated not only by matters pertaining to what architecture is, but also, to what it can do. Thus, the questions motivating this work derive from my education in architecture which, at their most rudimentary level, entail a deep fascination with the nature of space, and thus the problem of time. And, subsequently, a practical desire to understand the conditions that constituted experience, and thus perception, sensation and mind. My interest also developed from a general disposition towards others and world founded in principles of human equality and rights with respect to both freedom and responsibility. During my years practicing architecture, these questions as they were brought through the perspective of design continued to inspire me. At the same time, my interest in investigating these questions through theoretical and philosophical research persisted until my aspiration to engage in critical thought outpaced my desire to practice. Hence, a turn in career to work as an academic in the discipline of architecture and the area of architecture theory. This research may be perceived by some as situated outside the realm of architecture. However, this is not the case. My approach to architecture theory is not one that begins with a study of the object, or, for some, one might say the subject of architecture. That is, if the object is understood as the manifestation in thought, process or form of the building or built environment (real or conceived) itself; and if the subject is understood as the thought or idea emanating from the mind of the architect (as author). While there is much architecture theory advanced from this perspective lining my own bookshelves and utilized in my work as an educator. The concerns that have always called me towards thinking about architecture as the imagined and constructed world in which we live are those that query the very nature of concepts, notions, ideologies and intellectual constructions and beliefs upon which culture and society – architecture as both a cultural product and a social actor – are formed. This goes, as well, to the considerations that motivate my concern for people, not users or inhabitants as such, but as ontologically situated beings in the world. Accordingly, my work primarily deals with the content, history and effects of architecture as it relates to theories of space, time, the body, and cognition. Employing and developing theories and methods from disciplines including philosophy, cultural studies, literary theory, political, social and economic theory, cognitive psychology, and the neurosciences in the broadest sense. Admittedly, the nature of theoretical discourse has shown itself to be problematic over the past fifty-plus years; it has also proven to be transformative. Critical thinkers in the late 1960s developed a sustained critique of their philosophical predecessors – primarily in regard to Marx on one hand and Heidegger on the other – with a critique of social history and a displacement of metaphysics resulting in a repositioning of social and cultural discourse. Of course, the debate unfolded against the philosophical and aesthetic background of not only Marx and Heidegger, but also Nietzsche, Hegel and Freud on one hand, and Manet, Cézanne, Baudelaire and Mallarmé, Wagner and Debussy on the other. In architecture, the debate extended to Ruskin and Wölfflin, and to Wright and Corbusier, amongst others. This period, in itself, refers to an unprecedented artistic, scientific, economic, and technological mutation. Prevalent underpinnings remain identifiable, for instance an attack on the absolute nature of knowledge, which has brought about a fundamental rethinking of both the nature of consciousness, as well as a critique of science. As Foucault suggested, one of the great problems that arose in the 1950s was that of the political status of science and the ideological functions that it could serve. Another rebuke can be seen as the challenge to the primacy of truth as an adequation of subject to thing. This culminated in a radical critique of subjectivity resulting, some years later, in the so-called post-humanist-subject. In order to be rid of the subject itself, Foucault, in ‘Truth and Power’ (1977) argued that it was necessary to dispense with the essentialist subject both at the extremes and in-between the enlightenment’s humanist subject and its ideals of knowledge as self-constituting; as well as phenomenology’s fabrication of the subject as evolving through and embodying the course of history. Reflecting on this history, that post-war moment of theory, one cannot help but be struck by the complexity and the ambiguity of the adventure; qualities most evident in the fact that new spaces and new means of writing and drawing, of thinking and making emerged. Ideas that modified our understanding of both communication and the image, of both space and time. Discourses, when combined with a reflexivity within certain architectures and certain texts, rendered them somehow indefinitely open. In the 1960s, literary theory transformed thought on both sides of the Atlantic. For instance, Roland Barthes’s de-sanctioning of the biography-centric author, or the removal of authority from the author turned scriptor in ‘The Death of the Author’ (1967), or Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality with ‘Word, Dialogue and Novel’ (1969). These works impacted our thinking on linguistic phenomena and the origin (or non-originality) of textual content and further, on the invention of new forms of writing and affective relations. Such theories informed and redirected thinking in architecture, for instance, Diana Agrest and Mario Gandelsonas’s work ‘Semiotics and Architecture: Ideological Consumption or Theoretical Work’ was published in the first issue of Oppositions, an architectural journal produced between 1973 and 1984 by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. With this, the influence of the French intellectual climate as well as the Italian discourse on semiotics was brought to the centre of Anglo-American discourse in architecture theory. The intellectual trajectory along which this history is traced and the terrain on which it now takes place will be recognisable to anyone familiar with the work of such thinkers as Henri Bergson, Louis Althusser, Gabriel Tarde, Walter Benjamin, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and, of course, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Maurizio Lazzarato. The importance of the radically original works that emerged in the seventies and eighties cannot be overestimated, for instance: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and his lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, and Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia volumes Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. These works, translated into English shortly after their original publication, were being read throughout many disciplines outside of philosophy including schools of architecture, and their influence can only be said to have increased. I share the above brief history so as to situate my work for those less familiar with the work of theory – whether architecture or otherwise – as this, too, is the intellectual trajectory and exploration along which my own work, as well as many of my contemporaries, travels. In my own work, the influence of the nineteenth/ twentieth-century French vitalist philosopher Henri Bergson – the great thinker of time and, as Walter Benjamin suggested, a seminal source to consult in considering the problem of experience – has quite profoundly informed my thinking and shaped its outcomes. Both with respect to time and space as well as body and brain, his influence is reflected in the title of this volume. That said, this is not a collection of chapters on Bergson’s philosophy. It is a collection on critical concepts I believe to be of importance for contemporary critique, delivered through topics that are relevant – at times directly and at others indirectly – to our current moment. This is a work of great commitment and it has sustained itself over time. It is my hope the reader finds some value in this as well.

In this reading, from Enemies of Hope (1997), Tallis argues that a major problem with theories that downgrade the significance of consciousness is the extent to which such theories themselves embody higher levels of consciousness than they would seem to allow. This implies that anyone convinced of the truth of such theories is going to be involved in a high degree of self-deception about their nature and origin. Unless one accepts that the very existence of theories like those of Freud and Marx is evidence of high levels of disinterested consciousness — and of our ability to get at truths that are not ruled out by their ultimate roots in unconscious processes — such theories must undermine their own credibility. The Interpretation of Dreams is evidence of the domination of a high order of consciousness over the unconscious. Explicitness is manifest everywhere in its pages. Furthermore, there is an unacceptable sense of helplessness induced by theories that displace consciousness to the margins. Post-Saussureans, like Derrida and Lacan, believe that language can never express intentions, wishes, feelings and aspirations because the system dominates over the speaker, producing effects that are signs of nothing other than the operation of its own rules. To adapt a remark of Lacan’s, representation represents nothing other than the lack of the function that engenders it. One must despair of effective intervention in the life of the world since language is the site only of error, exile and loss. Tallis seeks to reassert the reality of the self and by so doing to reassert the centrality of individual experience and individual agency as expressed even in the most commonplace actions and off-the-shelf utterances such as saying ‘hello’. Our own actual and unique experience is proof of the distance between us and the systems for whose domination over us too many in the twentieth century have argued.KeywordsMarxist TheoryCultural ConstraintCritical Legal StudyInaugural LectureInterpretive CommunityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.