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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Philosophy & theory of psychology > Psychoanalysis & psychoanalytical theory
How to Critique Authoritarian Populism: Methodologies of the
Frankfurt School offers a comprehensive introduction to the
techniques used by the early Frankfurt School to study and combat
authoritarianism and authoritarian populism. In recent years there
has been a resurgence of interest in the writings of the early
Frankfurt School, at the same time as authoritarian populist
movements are resurging in Europe and the Americas. This volume
shows why and how Frankfurt School methodologies can and should be
used to address the rise of authoritarianism today. Critical theory
scholars are assembled from a variety of disciplines to discuss
Frankfurt School approaches to dialectical philosophy,
psychoanalytic theory, human subjects research, discourse analysis
and media studies. Contributors include: Robert J. Antonio,
Stefanie Baumann, Christopher Craig Brittain, Dustin J. Byrd,
Mariana Caldas Pinto Ferreira, Panayota Gounari, Peter-Erwin
Jansen, Imaculada Kangussu, Douglas Kellner, Dan Krier, Lauren
Langman, Claudia Leeb, Gregory Joseph Menillo, Jeremiah Morelock,
Felipe Ziotti Narita, Michael R. Ott, Charles Reitz, Avery Schatz,
Rudolf J. Siebert, William M. Sipling, David Norman Smith, Daniel
Sullivan, and AK Thompson.
Bringing Jean Genet and Jacques Lacan into dialogue, James Penney
examines the overlooked similarities between Genet's literary
oeuvre and Lacanian psychoanalysis, uncovering in particular their
shared ontology of fragility and incompletion. This book exposes
the two thinkers' joint and unwavering ontological conviction that
the representations that make up the world of appearances are
inherently enigmatic: inscrutable, not only on the level of their
problematic link to knowledge and meaning, but also, more
fundamentally, as concerns the reliability of their existence.
According to Genet and Lacan, the signification of words and images
will forever remain unfulfilled, just like the whole of reality, as
if prematurely removed from the oven, under-baked. Genet, Lacan and
the Ontology of Incompletion reveals how, in the same manner as
Lacan's psychoanalytic act, Genet's acts of poetry further seek to
expose the fragile prop that holds our reality together, baring the
fissures in being for which fantasy normally compensates. Moving
away from scholarship that considers Genet's plays, novels,
sexuality and politics in isolation, Penney explores the whole span
of Genet's work, from his early novels to the
posthumously-published Prisoner of Love and, combining this with
psychoanalysis, opens up new avenues for thinking about Genet,
Lacan and our wanting being.
What happens in our unconscious minds when we listen to, produce or
perform popular music? The Unconscious - a much misunderstood
concept from philosophy and psychology - works through human
subjects as we produce music and can be traced through the music we
engage with. Through a new collaboration between music theorist and
philosopher, Smith and Overy present the long history of the
unconscious and its related concepts, working systematically
through philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,
psychoanalysts such as Freud and Lacan, to theorists such as
Deleuze and Kristeva. The theories offered are vital to follow the
psychological complexity of popular music, demonstrated through
close readings of individual songs, albums, artists, genres, and
popular music practices. Among countless artists, Listening to the
Unconscious draws from Prince to Sufjan Stevens, from Robyn to Xiu
Xiu, from Joanna Newsom to Arcade Fire, from PJ Harvey to LCD Sound
System, each of whom offer exciting inroads into the fascinating
worlds of our unconscious musical minds. And in return, theories of
the unconscious can perhaps takes us deeper into the heart of
popular music.
This book offers a new theoretical framework within which to
understand "the mind-body problem". The crux of this problem is
phenomenal experience, which Thomas Nagel famously described as
"what it is like" to be a certain living creature. David Chalmers
refers to the problem of "what-it-is-like" as "the hard problem" of
consciousness and claims that this problem is so "hard" that
investigators have either just ignored the issue completely,
investigated a similar (but distinct) problem, or claimed that
there is literally nothing to investigate - that phenomenal
experience is illusory. This book contends that phenomenal
experience is both very real and very important. Two specific
"biological naturalist" views are considered in depth. One of these
two views, in particular, seems to be free from problems; adopting
something along the lines of this view might finally allow us to
make sense of the mind-body problem. An essential read for anyone
who believes that no satisfactory solution to "the mind-body
problem" has yet been discovered.
Anyone who's called upon to address a problem and the relative
sense of confusion associated with it, above all those who do so in
a professional capacity, must have at least a basic knowledge of
the underlying psychology. In fact, in order to effectively perform
one's own institutional role, as well as any unforeseeable tasks
that may be imposed by the specific circumstances, it is crucial to
have a certain familiarity with the basic principles of this
discipline, which marks a borderline between the rigidity of the
exact sciences and the flexibility of the social sciences. This
book is dedicated at all those working in the field of security,
emergency and risk management, including: engineers, psychologists,
public authorities, armed forces personnel, para-medical staff and
health workers, Civil Protection personnel, Firefighters, etc.
Humankind has a profound and complex relationship with the sea, a
relationship that is extensively reflected in biology, psychology,
religion, literature and poetry. The sea cradles and soothes us, we
visit it often for solace and inspiration, it is familiar, being
the place where life ultimately began. Yet the sea is also dark and
mysterious and often spells catastrophe and death. The sea is a set
of contradictions: kind, cruel, indifferent. She is a blind will
that will 'have her way'. In exploring this most capricious of
phenomena, David Farrell Krell engages the work of an array of
thinkers and writers including, but not limited to, Homer, Thales,
Anaximander, Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Hoelderlin, Melville,
Woolf, Whitman, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schelling, Ferenczi, Rank and
Freud. The Sea explores the significance in Western civilization of
the catastrophic and generative power of the sea and what
humankind's complex relationship with it reveals about the human
condition, human consciousness, temporality, striving, anxiety,
happiness and mortality.
Among numerous ancient Western tropes about gender and procreation,
"the seed and the soil" is arguably the oldest, most potent, and
most invisible in its apparent naturalness. The Gender Vendors
denaturalizes this proto-theory of procreation and deconstructs its
contemporary legacy. As metaphor for gender and procreation,
seed-and-soil constructs the father as the sole generating parent
and the mother as nurturing medium, like soil, for the man's
seed-child. In other words, men give life; women merely give birth.
The Gender Vendors examines seed-and-soil in the context of the
psychology of gender, honor and chastity codes, female genital
mutilation, the taboo on male femininity, femiphobia (the fear of
being feminine or feminized), sexual violence, institutionalized
abuse, the early modern witch hunts, the medicalization and
criminalization of gender nonconformity, and campaigns against
women's rights. The examination is structured around particular
watersheds in the history of seed-and-soil, for example, Genesis,
ancient Greece, early Christianity, the medieval Church, the early
modern European witch hunts, and the campaigns of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries against women's suffrage and education. The
neglected story of seed-and-soil matters to everyone who cares
about gender equality and why it is taking so long to achieve.
Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and
in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental
and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades desire agalma,
the good object. I would go even further. How can we analysts fail
to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has
the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the
envelope in which the object of desire is found. It is in order to
clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that
Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire s serf in his
relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades
by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired
him, he wanted to see Socrates desire manifest itself in a sign, in
order to know that the other the object, agalma was at his mercy.
Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that
Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something
that is so affectively laden. The daemon of (Aidos), Shame, about
which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes
here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is
unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which
in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is
revealed its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.
Jacques Lacan
What is Philosophy? is the last instalment of a remarkable
twenty-year collaboration between the philosopher Gilles Deleuze
and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. This hugely important text
attempts to explain the terms of their collaboration and to define
the activity of philosophy in which they have been engaged. A major
contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy, it
nevertheless remains distinctly challenging for readers faced for
the first time with Deleuze and Guattari's unusual and somewhat
allusive style. Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?': A
Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this
hugely important and yet challenging work. Written specifically to
meet the needs of students coming to Deleuze and Guattari for the
first time, the book offers guidance on: - Philosophical and
historical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and
influence - Further reading
In a "return" to Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud, Intimacy and the
Anxieties of Cinematic Flesh explores how we can engage these
foundational thinkers of phenomenology and psychoanalysis in an
original approach to film. The idea of the intimate spectator
caught up in anxiety is developed to investigate a range of topics
central to these critical approaches and cinema, including: flesh
as a disruptive state formed in the relationships of intimacy and
anxiety; time and the formation of cinema's enduring objects; space
and things; the sensual, the "real" and the unconscious; wildness,
disruption, and resistance; and the nightmare, reading "phantasy"
across the critical fields. Along with Husserl and Freud, other key
thinkers discussed include Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Mikel Dufrenne in phenomenology; Melanie Klein,
Ernest Jones, Julia Kristeva, and Rosine Lefort in psychoanalysis.
Framing these issues and critical approaches is the question: how
might Husserlian phenomenology and Freudian/Lacanian
psychoanalysis, so often seen as contradistinctive, be explored
through their potential commonalities rather than differences? In
addressing such a question, this book postulates a new approach to
film through this phenomenological/psychoanalytic
reconceptualization. A wide range of films are examined not simply
as exemplars, but to test the idea that cinema itself can be a
version of critical thinking.
‘I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals’ Carl Jung.
An eye-opening biography of one of the most influential psychiatrists of the modern age, drawing from his lectures, conversations, and own writings.
In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, Carl Gustav Jung undertook the telling of his life story. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is that book, composed of conversations with his colleague and friend Aniela Jaffé, as well as chapters written in his own hand, and other materials. Jung continued to work on the final stages of the manuscript until shortly before his death on June 6, 1961, making this a uniquely comprehensive reflection on a remarkable life.
The year 2019 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of
Kurt Cobain, an artist whose music, words, and images continue to
move millions of fans worldwide. As the first academic study that
provides a literary analysis of Cobain's creative writings, Arthur
Flannigan Saint-Aubin's The Pleasures of Death: Kurt Cobain's
Masochistic and Melancholic Persona approaches the journals and
songs crafted by Nirvana's iconic front man from the perspective of
cultural theory and psychoanalytic aesthetics. Drawing on critiques
and reformulations of psychoanalytic theory by feminist, queer, and
antiracist scholars, Saint-Aubin considers the literary means by
which Cobain creates the persona of a young, white, heterosexual
man who expresses masochistic and melancholic behaviors. On the one
hand, this individual welcomes pain and humiliation as atonement
for unpardonable sins; on the other, he experiences a profound
sense of loss and grief, seeking death as the ultimate act of
pleasure. The first-person narrators and characters that populate
Cobain's texts underscore the political and aesthetic repercussions
of his art. Cobain's distinctive version of grunge, understood as a
subculture, a literary genre, and a cultural practice, represents a
specific performance of race and gender, one that facilitates an
understanding of the self as part of a larger social order.
Saint-Aubin approaches Cobain's writings independently of the
artist's biography, positioning these texts within the tradition of
postmodern representations of masculinity in twentieth-century
American fiction, while also suggesting connections to European
Romantic traditions from the nineteenth century that postulate a
relation between melancholy (or depression) and creativity. In
turn, through Saint-Aubin's elegant analysis, Cobain's creative
writings illuminate contradictions and inconsistencies within
psychoanalytic theory itself concerning the intersection of
masculinity, masochism, melancholy, and the death drive. By
foregrounding Cobain's ability to challenge coextensive links
between gender, sexuality, and race, The Pleasures of Death reveals
how the cultural politics and aesthetics of this tragic icon's
works align with feminist strategies, invite queer readings, and
perform antiracist critiques of American culture.
The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception
of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which
continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an
absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance,
sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic
'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been
marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that
which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of
dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine
Malabou, Slavoj Zizek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought
considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has
emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for
difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to
reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic
narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's
philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding
of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices
in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is
central to this revaluation of Hegel.
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