Suchergebnisse

Introduction: the uncanny guest -- Israel, divine hostess -- Cosmopolitan hospitality and secular ethics: Kant today -- Under the sign of the hostess: Pierre Klossowski's laws of hospitality -- Hospitality after the death of God -- Welcoming Dionysus, or, The subject as corps morcelé -- The other jouissance, a gay sçavoir: feminine hospitality and the ethics of psychoanalysis

This essay approaches the problem of the act from the perspective of psychoanalysis, which teaches us that the fear of the act as catastrophic—and especially as a mortal threat to the social bond—is often synonymous with the repudiation of the unconscious itself, whether by the individual subject or by the collective. To understand how an act of the unconscious can be received as catastrophic, whether by the actor or by others, we first have to consider both the resistance to the act at the level of the ego and its censorship by culture and civilization. For this we need to be more explicit about the nature of the act with which psychoanalysis is concerned, which is very different from other kinds of acts.

This essay examines the stakes of the traversal of the fantasy in the unfolding of an analysis, arguing that the aim of a psychoanalysis is to liberate the unconscious quest that traverses the analysand by giving expression to what has been censored in his or her body. Paradoxically, however, it claims that this censored quest is not only unique to the individual analysand but something that articulates that subject to humanity as a whole. While Freud consistently underscores the fundamental solitude of the human being with respect to the free drive and the fantasies to which it gives rise, the under-examined corollary of this position is that human reality is fundamentally transindividual, traversed by a quest that impacts each and every human being but that belongs to no one in particular. The second section explores this transindividual dimension through a clinical case of hysteria; the third turns to the procedure of the Pass that for Lacan guarantees the production of the analyst, arguing that this procedure is essential precisely because it confirms the opening to the human that is the logical conclusion of an analytic cure.

As a drive to the inorganic, the death drive is fundamentally opposed to sensuality and, specifically, to pleasure and pain. This is why Gilles Deleuze understands Freud's account of the death drive as the "beyond of the pleasure principle" not in terms of the transgression of a boundary or limit (going beyond pleasure into something painful or traumatic), but rather as a foray into speculative philosophy, an attempt to identify the transcendent principle or higher law of the pleasure principle, the supersensual law of its sensual manifestations. This paper explores the construction of the supersensual reality of the death drive in masochistic fantasy and in fetishistic disavowal, exploring their affinity not only with art and aesthetics but with mathematical and formal constructions. Both help to elucidate Freud's early insight that the death drive is more mathematical than physical, a purely immanent energy with no sensual manifestation.

The question at the core of this essay is whether the subjective stance of one person can initiate broad change or inspire collective action by means other than the group psychology, not by appealing to a particular set of values or ideals or by cementing the group through identification or libidinal cathexes but by foregrounding the experience of the desiring subject. It takes as its point of departure Jacques Lacan's definition of anxiety as "the affect that responds to the desire of the Other." If love is about the strategies of seduction that sustain the imaginary coherence of the ego, desire is linked to the anxiety induced by the loss of the ego ideals and the encounter with castration. The corollary is that the practice of psychoanalysis is founded on the confrontation with the anxiety provoked by the desire of the Other and the assumption that only this can result in real change.
This article examines three examples of social tie that are structured around the desire of the founder and the anxiety it induces: the interdiction of sacrifice and the worship of an absent God in the religion of Moses, the role of the transference in Freud's invention of psychoanalysis, and the "love of the enemy" in the discourse of Jesus. The author argues that the clinical context sheds light on the violent resistance and repression that greeted the founding acts of Moses and Jesus and offers insight into the structural antagonism between the founder's desire and the possibility of a collective movement. The examples of Moses and Jesus in turn develop a dimension of the analytic experience that is not always given sufficient weight: that desire must find expression in an act or in the production of a new object that intervenes in the world so as to transform it.

From the moment Freud first came up against repetition and the resistance of the symptom in his clinical practice and was thus forced to acknowledge a beyond of the pleasure principle that acts within the subject, the unconscious could no longer be conceived as a site of representations that are repressed because they are forbidden or inadmissible in the cultural or social sphere. This essay explores the manifestations and the consequences of this act in the clinical practice and in the domain of aesthetics, arguing that the act is not merely the source of the subject's troubles but the manifestation of an unconscious quest by which we recognize desire.

This metapsychological essay attempts to deduce the origin of the death drive from the author's clinical experience with analysands under transference. It proposes that Freud locates the stakes of speech, as a response to the Other, at the heart of the question of languager–but under the singular modality of the death drive. Attempting to reconstruct the experience of the first men, the author proposes that the death drive responded to the anxiety provoked by their encounter with the absence at the heart of the address, or with the Other as such, before they were in possession of the myths and signifiers that would allow them to evoke that experience.