We have successfully carried out the research work of 'Lacan/Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Humanities,' producing a total of 7 articles. As is proposed in the original study plan, these articles are concerned with the inquires into the theories of psy ...
We have successfully carried out the research work of 'Lacan/Freud: Psychoanalysis and the Humanities,' producing a total of 7 articles. As is proposed in the original study plan, these articles are concerned with the inquires into the theories of psychoanalysis itself and their application to the humanities in general. Roughly divided, articles 1-3 concerns the former, while articles 4-7 concerns the latter.
Article1, entitled 'The Real and the Symbolic: Lacan's Theory of Representation,' is an examination of the constitutive incommensurability between the ineffable, unrepresenable real, which 'resists symbolization absolutely,' and the symbolically represented world, in which a signifier represents the subject for another signifier. Much discussed in this connection is the way in which the real, in Hegelian terms, is both presupposed and posed by the symbolic.
Article 2, entitled 'S(-O): Signifier of the Lack in the Other: Dialectics of Social Impossibility,' discusses 'the big secret of psychoanalysis' that the big Other, the symbolic order itself is also crossed-out by a fundamental impossibility, structured around a traumatic kernel, around a central lack. Just like the subject's radical ex-centricity to itself, the social Other is eccentric to itself due to a radical exteriority that dislocates it. This lack in the Other leads to the dialectics of social impossibility.
Article 3, entitled 'The Subject's Position vis-a-vis the Other: Lacanian Discourse on Sex,' is an examination of Lacan's discourse on sex in terms of the phallus and jouissance with special reference to the formulas of sexuation as presented in his seminar XX: Encore. The psychoanalytically defined sexual difference comes into being as a result of the subject's confrontation with the symbolic Other, the locus of signifiers, irrespective of the biological or anatomical difference. In other words, the 'sexuation' is a function of the subject's position vis-a-vis the Other. This position relative to the phallus as a signifier leads to the discussion of the real of sexual difference.
Article 4, entitled 'Process without Subject, or Subject as Process : Psychoanalysis and Althusser,' investigates a possible relationship between marxism and psychoanalysis as is implied in the Althusser's encounter with Lacan. Special attention is drawn to the way in which in his later years, Althusser needs a philosophical category that he earlier criticized and annulled as 'humanistic,' which is closely related to the Lacanian concept of the subject.
Article 5, entitled 'Uncanny Jewishness: Freud's Quest for the (Im)possible Origin,' articulates in terms of psychoanalysis and deconstruction the way in which Freud's attempt to construct the origin of Jewishness in his Moses and Monothecism is coterminous with the birth of the subject of psychoanalysis. The Egypptian Moses as object a is the internal limit circumcising the symbolic order, relating to a void that can never be fully integrated into any symbolic narrative. The psychoanalytic subject entails a confrontation with this a which is simultaneously familiar and foreign.
Article 6, entitled ‘The Controversy on the Sexual Difference, Femininity, and the Phallic Phase: Are Women Born or Made : Freud and Jones,' deals with the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism, especially the feminine sexuality. According to this article, the Freudian theory of the Oedipus Complex and phallic phase is an analytic theory that accounts for the mechanism by which a subject-to-be without sexual identity becomes a man or a woman sexually.
Article 7, entitled 'Ethics of Love,' discusses the problem of love philosophically in terms of psychoanalysis and deconstruction. It is love that moves from eros seeking the fantasy of wholeness through philos emphasizing the absolute difference to agape implying the inner fracture of the difference itself.