Some thoughts on mourning and melancholia
Darian Leader
This paper discusses Freud's essay 'Mourning and Melancholia' and post-Freudian and Lacanian responses to it. We attempt to encourage a dialogue between these different traditions, and to make some suggestions as to the particularities of the mourning process and the position of the melancholic. An attention to the question of language and the signifier helps us to situate some of the parameters of clinical work.
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The Question of the Father: Father and Symptom
Sidi Askofaré and Marie-Jean Sauret
Freud can be credited with having grasped the importance of the question of the father in the process of subjectivation and humanization. However, the response that he offered remains complex and heterogeneous. This article attempts to clarify Lacan’s contribution, by restoring the stages of his elaboration: from his re-opening of Freud’s teaching (the Oedipus and castration complexes), and its extensions (the paternal imago), to his innovations (the paternal metaphor, the trilogy of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary), to his self-correction (the challenging of the symbolic father and the promotion of the real father). At the end, the question of the father joins that of the symptom. A clinical case demonstrates how this contribution is interesting not only for directing the treatment but also for diagnosing the new “discontents” in civilization.
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The Act and Law: An Ethics of Radical Good
Simon Pender
This paper examines the relationship between (moral) law, (socio-symbolic) Law, and the ethical act in psychoanalysis and its philosophical roots, Kantian ethics. My focus is on the writings of the theorists Jacques Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Alenka Zupancic; while I discuss Kant, this is intended primarily as a supplement and corrective to the problems addressed in the theoretical material -– I call essentially for a ‘return to Kant’. I consider two difficulties in particular: the nature of the ethical act’s transgression, and the related temptation to assign determinate content to Kant’s categorical imperative. In conclusion, I consider two further difficulties: Freud’s myth of the primal father from Totem and Taboo, and Kant’s ‘Third Conflict of the Transcendental Ideas’ in the Critique of Practical Reason. Again, I propose that Kant offers the answer -– and thus to read Freud’s myth as a narrative overlaid on the troubling ethical act founding any social order.
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On torture, passionate attachment and diabolical evil: ethics in Rossellini’s Open City and Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Fabio Vighi
This article makes use of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to compare Roberto Rossellini’s classic neorealist film Open City (1945) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s last cinematic work, Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975). More specifically, it suggests that despite the two films’ obvious ideological and stylistic differences, what emerges through a psychoanalytic reading is the evidence that these films share a common ethical position. By utilising a number of key notions of Lacanian theory (such as jouissance, desire and fantasy) to explore the questions of evil, torture and passionate attachment within the two film narratives, I try to demonstrate that Rossellini’s and Pasolini’s representations of the ethical act reveal a surprisingly similar politicisation of the death-drive as the purely negative agency that suspends the subject’s symbolic network thus allowing for its radical re-configuration. Both Open City and Salò, therefore, should be seen as works which attempt to re-define the founding moment of ethics.
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Encounters of the Real Kind: Sussing Out the Limits of Laclau’s Embrace of Lacan
Jason Glynos and Yannis Stavrakakis
In this essay we explore the relevance of psychoanalysis for political theory by surveying a prominent political theorist’s work from a Lacanian perspective. Ernesto Laclau’s work explicitly refers to a range of Lacanian terms of art and is extremely suggestive of many conceptual affinities even where there is no direct terminological cross-over. While acknowledging the insightful nature of these structural homologies, our essay also seeks to probe the limits of such theoretical congruence, with a view to opening up a set of questions for further research. We use Lacan’s category of the real as the central probing tool, arguing that a specific modality of this order (jouissance) offers a productive way of spurring on the dialogue between and among scholars inspired by Lacan and Laclau.
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