Summaries
Eric Anders is a psychoanalyst in Oakland, California, and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of German Studies at Stanford University. He is a member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis and was the Marston Milbauer Fellow at the Institute for the Psychological Study of the Arts at the University of Florida, where he did his Ph.D. in English. His research has been focused …
This issue comprises two different parts. Part 1, Reprints, consists of papers and conversations which originally appeared in issues n. 2 and n. 3-4. Often cited and requested, but now out of print, they are re-printed here due to great demand by many friends and readers. The papers are arranged along the same thematic frames as in the past. The section Resistances (JEP n. 2, Fall 1995-…
San Lorenzo by the sea. A windy September afternoon, frayed clouds scudding by. From where I sit at the beach’s edge, with the village behind me, the sea is a violet ribbon, raveling and unraveling endlessly. I have been here, quite still, for maybe over an hour. In the sheltered spot where I’ve set up my deck chair, there is only an occasional gust of wind. I’ve slipped into a languid …
A political commitment based on a Marxist hope in the triumph of the proletariat is no longer possible, now that it is clear neither the proletariat subject nor working class solidarity is real. The effects of technology and scientific development on everyday lifeÑthe post-modernÑcompose a System seeking only its own expansion, perpetuating itself by absorbing even defenses against it. The psychoanalytic notion of resistance shows that art may act as a successful defense against the utility of the System, giving form to what cannot be expressed or shown.
In a conversation between the dead and the living, the history of Lacan's relation to the philosophers is taken up under three protocols: the chiasmus, the past perfect of deferred action, the chiastic invagination. Deconstruction can question the limits and rules of the psychoanalytic situation.
An interview with André Green by Sergio Benvenuto (1)
The difficulty of Lacan's undertaking an ethics in relation to both its origins at an essential level of psychoanalysis and a dominant ethics of the good necessarily led to the theater of tragedy. Lacan's reading of Antigone revealed the beauty of the hero appearing as she crosses the line of the second death that is tied to the unconscious and the death drive. Art achieves a catharsis by encircling the Thing in a brilliant purification; analysis of the aesthetic leads to a tragic ethics of psychoanalysis.
A Conversation with Mario Perniola by Sergio Benvenuto and Cristiana Cimino
We chosen ones are few, we happy idlers, Who care not for contemptible usefulness... A.S. Pushkin, "Mozart and Salieri"(1)
Contemporary productions may remain faithful to the truth of classical operas in adaptations, revealing the paradoxes of desire and the gaps between belief and concrete action supporting ideology. The discordances between music and words in opera articulate worldly disjunctures between ideology, belief and concrete practice that produce skepticism and cynicism. In contrast to the irony of Wagner's Tristan in which truth lies in dramatic events that contradict the music, truth in Mozart's Così fan tutte lies in the music that contradicts words. Mozart's work, therefore, rather than standing as an exemplar of classical opera, is modern in its staging of the misfit between subjectivity and practical acts.
The author examines critically the increasing role of citations and of other bibliometric indicators, such as the "impact factor" of journals, in the evaluation of scientific activity. He concludes that while the widespread use of the "impact factor" to evaluate the relative importance of journals and of the papers which they published proved to be a very effective marketing tool for commercial publishers of scientific journals, there is no evidence that the use of this indicator was of any benefit to science.
Alan Bass is a training and supervising analyst at several psychoanalytic institutes in New York, and on the graduate philosophy faculty at the New School for Social Research. He is most known as the translator of four books by Jacques Derrida, a "first-generation student of deconstruction" (2000, vii). His two books under consideration here correspond to these two worlds: Difference and Disavowal is written for psychoanalytic clinicians, while Interpretation and Difference is written more for philosophers. The two books, however, are "really one" (2006, ix), and they do considerably more than build much needed bridges between these two worlds. They are rare works which succeed in bringing together sophisticated philosophy with a rigorous and subtle reading of psychoanalysis. Moreover, all of Bass's work is grounded in the clinical practicality of a seasoned psychoanalyst, which is even more rare considering the philosophical sophistication and depth of his overall project. Bass brings together an expansion of psychoanalysis with an expansion of the philosophies of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida. One can say about Bass's project what Derrida (1995, p. 75) said about his own work in Archive Fever: it is a "crossing of a certain psychoanalysis with a certain deconstruction". It should be added that Bass's unique contributions here are many and crucial, since psychoanalysis is usually not in harmony with deconstruction, and deconstruction has never before attempted a metapsychological reworking of psychoanalysis.
Some patients say they don't exist; others never speak about their body, and when the question is raised, one has the impression that it has no meaning for them. Some feel that they were never born, or it is their analyst who comes to this conclusion. All these patients, and others, too, who suffer from diverse symptoms such as bulimia, asthma or phobias, have only one body with their mother. Absence from themselves, a sense of the emptiness and uselessness of any undertaking, coexist [JTM1]with the impossibility of imagining a separation. The idea of one body for two or of one life for two alone makes it possible to account for an existence which is ultimately nothing but a non-existence.
