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Did Freud present a scientific hypothesis about the unconscious,
as he always maintained and as many of his disciples keep
repeating? This question has long prompted debates concerning the
legitimacy and usefulness of psychoanalysis, and it is of utmost
importance to Lacanian analysts, whose main project has been to
stress Freud's scientific grounding. Here Jacques Bouveresse, a
noted authority on Ludwig Wittgenstein, contributes to the debate
by turning to this Austrian-born philosopher and contemporary of
Freud for a candid assessment of the early issues surrounding
psychoanalysis. Wittgenstein, who himself had delivered a
devastating critique of traditional philosophy, sympathetically
pondered Freud's claim to have produced a scientific theory in
proposing a new model of the human psyche. What Wittgenstein
recognized--and what Bouveresse so eloquently stresses for today's
reader--is that psychoanalysis does not aim to produce a change
limited to the intellect but rather seeks to provoke an authentic
change of human attitudes. The beauty behind the theory of the
unconscious for Wittgenstein is that it breaks away from
scientific, causal explanations to offer new forms of thinking and
speaking, or rather, a new mythology.
Offering a critical view of all the texts in which Wittgenstein
mentions Freud, Bouveresse immerses us in the intellectual climate
of Vienna in the early part of the twentieth century. Although we
come to see why Wittgenstein did not view psychoanalysis as a
science proper, we are nonetheless made to feel the philosopher's
sense of wonder and respect for the cultural task Freud took on as
he found new ways meaningfully to discuss human concerns.
Intertwined in this story of Wittgenstein's grappling with the
theory of the unconscious is the story of how he came to question
the authority of science and of philosophy itself. While aiming
primarily at the clarification of Wittgenstein's opinion of Freud,
Bouveresse's book can be read as a challenge to the French
psychoanalytic school of Lacan and as a provocative commentary on
cultural authority.
Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the
philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (1966-69), the most
ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French
structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and
Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever
philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or
experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure
specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and
ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate
analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they
argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary
transformation. Volume One of Concept and Form translates some of
the most important theoretical texts from the Cahiers pour
l'Analyse; this second volume collects newly commissioned essays on
the journal, together with recent interviews with people who were
either members of its editorial board or associated with its
broader theoretical project. It aims to help reconstruct the
intellectual context of the Cahiers, and to assess its contemporary
theoretical legacy. Prefaced by an overview of the project's
rigorous investment in science and conceptual analysis, the volume
considers in particular the Cahiers' distinctive effort to link the
apparently incommensurable categories of 'structure' and 'subject',
so as to prepare for a new synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis.
Contributors include Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Edward Baring,
Jacques Bouveresse, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Peter Hallward,
Adrian Johnston, Patrice Maniglier, Tracy McNulty, Jean-Claude
Milner, Knox Peden, Jacques Ranciere, Francois Regnault, and Slavoj
Zizek.
Our planet's elliptical orbit around the Sun and its
billions-of-years existence are facts we take for granted, matters
every literate high school student is expected to grasp. But
humanity's struggle towards these scientific truths lasted
millennia. Few of us have more than the faintest notion of the path
we have travelled. Hubert Krivine tells the story of the thinkers
and scientists whose work allowed our species to put an age to the
planet and pinpoint our place in the solar system. It is a history
of bold innovators, with a broad cast of contributors - not only
Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, but Halley, Kelvin, Darwin and
Rutherford, among many others. Courage, iniquity, religious
dogmatism, genius and blind luck all played a part. This was an
epic struggle to free the mind from the constraints of cant,
ideology and superstition. From this history, Krivine delineates an
invaluable philosophy of science, one today under threat from
irrationalism and the fundamentalist movements of East and West,
which threaten both what we have attained at great cost and what we
still have to learn. Scientific progress is not a sufficient
condition for social progress; but it is a necessary one. The Earth
is not merely a history of scientific learning, but a stirring
defence of Enlightenment values in the quest for human advancement.
Depuis pres de quatre-vingt-dix ans le Tractatus continue, avec sa
reputation de texte cryptique, a defier les philosophes, suscitant
toujours de nouvelles lectures. A force de commentaires, il a
peut-etre perdu en mystere mais gagne en clarte: beaucoup de
questions sont a present mises a plat, contextualisees, mieux
comprises. Nous avons cherche a faire le point sur certaines
questions-cles sans essayer de trancher entre les grandes
interpretations qui ont ponctue l'histoire de l'exegese du Traite,
depuis la lecture en termes d' idealisme linguistique des annees
1950 jusqu'a la lecture plus recente - et plus vivante - en termes
d' esprit realiste de Cora Diamond. Mieux elucide, voire
demystifie, le Tractatus nous fait, encore et toujours, en revenir
au texte, a sa lettre, et a son esprit car, en un sens, le texte,
dans sa brievete, en dit toujours plus, meme si parfois on peut
avoir l'impression que tout a ete dit.
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