Love, hate, slavery, torture, addiction and death - as this book shows, only psychoanalysis can speak well of such matters. Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an untouchable project, caught between science and poetry, medicine and hermeneutics. This unsettled, unsettling status has recently induced the philosopher Alain Badiou to characterise psychoanalysis as an 'antiphilosophy', that is, as a practice that issues the strongest possible challenges to thought. Justin Clemens takes up the challenge of this denomination here, by re-examining a series of crucial psychoanalytic themes: addiction, fanaticism, love, slavery and torture. Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today.

Providing the most comprehensive examination of the two-way traffic between literature and psychoanalysis to date, this handbook looks at how each defines the other as well as addressing the key thinkers in psychoanalytic theory (Freud, Klein, Lacan, and the schools of thought each of these has generated). It examines the debts that these psychoanalytic traditions have to literature, and offers plentiful case-studies of literature's influence from psychoanalysis. Engaging with critical issues such as madness, memory, and colonialism, with reference to texts from authors as diverse as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Virginia Woolf, this collection is admirably broad in its scope and wide-ranging in its geographical coverage. It thinks about the impact of psychoanalysis in a wide variety of literatures as well as in film, and critical and cultural theory.

For Freud, famously, the feminine was a dark continent, or a riddle without an answer. This understanding concerns man’s relationship to the question of ‘woman’ but femininity is also a matter of sexuality and gender and therefore of identity and experience. Drawing together leading academics, including film and literary scholars, clinicians and artists from diverse backgrounds, Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory speaks to the continued relevance of psychoanalytic understanding in a social and political landscape where ideas of gender and sexuality are undergoing profound changes. This transdisciplinary collection crosses boundaries between clinical and psychological discourse and arts and humanities fields to approach the topic of femininity from a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives. From object relations, to Lacan, to queer theory, the essays here revisit and rethink the debates over what the feminine might be. The volume presents a major new work by leading feminist film scholar, Elizabeth Cowie, in which she presents a first intervention on the topic of film and the feminine for over 20 years, as well as a key essay by the prominent artist and psychoanalyst, Bracha Ettinger. Written by an international selection of contributors, this collection is an indispensable tool for film and literary scholars engaged with psychoanalysts and anybody interested in different approaches to the question of the feminine.

How is it possible that a phenomenon like psychoanalysis, which has dominated the cultural and intellectual life of the last century in Europe, North and South America, has seemingly had little-to-no resonance in Hong Kong? This book attempts to explain this phenomenon. Addressing the subject from an East to West approach, this book proposes an experience of displacement, as it is argued that the opportunity for psychoanalysis today is not just to be exported to the East, but rather to be re-invented after an encounter with a radically different culture. This encounter allows the Western practitioner to question their experience and highlights the assumptions of Western thought and knowledge. Following this, what remains of psychoanalysis as we know it? How can psychoanalysis be re-thought and re-formed today in a format independent of different theoretical orientations and schools? The book addresses key issues such as: Is there psychoanalysis in Hong Kong? How does one do research on psychoanalysis in Hong Kong? Why was the Freudian Unconscious not discovered in China? How can we describe the core of psychoanalysis and how can this description be understood in different cultural contexts? Can psychoanalytic research be led by adopting a quantitative or statistical methodology? Founded on the belief that psychoanalysis should be re-invented in light of its encounter with non-Western cultures, this book highlights an opportunity to undertake this as an intellectual, cultural and artistic challenge. It will enrich researchers’ and students’ understanding of psychoanalysis and inform broader views of psychoanalysis in non-Western contexts. Practicing psychoanalysts, students of psychoanalysis and those seeking to understand psychanalysis in different cultural contexts will be particularly interested readers.

Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the "linguistic turn" in modern philosophy and anatomizes the "antiphilosophy" of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein's thinking, Badiou refines his own definitions of the universal truths that govern his work. Bruno Bosteels's introduction argues that a continuing dialogue with Wittgenstein is inescapable for contemporary philosophy.

This book examines the crucial role of psychoanalysis in understanding what AI means for us as speaking, sexed subjects. Drawing on Lacanian theory and recent clinical developments it explores what philosophy and critical theory of AI has hitherto neglected: enjoyment. Through the reconceptualization of Intelligence, the Artificial Object and the Sexual Abyss the book outlines the Sexbot as a figure who exists on the boundary of psychoanalysis and AI. Through this figure and the medium of film, the author subverts Kant’s three Enlightenment questions and guides readers to transition from asking 'Does it think?' to 'Can it enjoy?' The book will appeal in particular to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, film and media studies, critical theory, feminist theory and AI research.

In contrast to the way inheritance is understood in scientific discourse and culture more broadly, inheritance in psychoanalysis is a paradox. Although it's impossible, strictly speaking, for the unconscious to be inherited, this volume demonstrates how the concept of inheritance can occasion a rich reassessment and reinvention of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The collection enacts a critical traversal of inheritance for psychoanalysis: from the most basic assumptions of natural or biological inheritance, such as innateness, heredity, evolution, and ontogenesis, to analysis of the ways cultural traditions can be challenged and transformed, and finally to the reinvention of psychoanalytic practice, in which the ethics of inheritance is fully realized as the individual's responsibility to transform the social bond. Featuring strong interdisciplinary analysis rooted in both psychoanalysis and philosophy, this volume further engages science, politics, and cultural studies, and addresses contemporary political challenges such as autism and transgenderism.

This book arises out of an important international conference held in 2006 to discuss how regulation by the state has affected psychoanalysis as a clinical discipline in many different parts of the world. It explores the threat in psychoanalytic practice and draws together arguments against it.

The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture brings together a respected team of philosophers and architecture scholars to ask what impact architecture has over today's culture and society. For three decades critical philosophy has been in discourse with architecture. Yet following the recent radical turn in contemporary philosophy, architecture's role in contemporary culture is rarely addressed. In turn, the architecture discourse in academia has remained ignorant of recent developments in radical philosophy. Providing the first platform for a debate between critics, architects and radical philosophers, this unique collection unties these two schools of thought. Contributors reason for or against the claim of the "missed encounter" between architecture and radical philosophy. They discuss why our prominent critical philosophers devote stimulating writings to the ideological impact of arts on the contemporary culture - music, literature, cinema, opera, theatre - without attempting a similar comprehensive analysis of architecture. By critically evaluating recent philosophy in relation to contemporary architecture, The Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture presents a thorough understanding of the new relationship between architecture and radical philosophy.

An engrossing account of the meteoric rise of contemporary philosophy’s most contentious and prolific intellectual. ​ Slovenian philosopher bad boy Slavoj Žižek is one of the most famous intellectuals of our time, publishing at a breakneck speed and lecturing around the world. With his unmistakable speaking style and set of mannerisms that have made him ripe material for internet humor and meme culture, he is recognizable to a wide spectrum of fans and detractors. But how did an intellectual from a remote Eastern European country come to such popular notoriety? In How Slavoj Became Žižek, sociologist Eliran Bar-El plumbs the emergence, popularization, and development of this phenomenon called “Žižek.” Beginning with Žižek’s early years as a thinker and political figure in Slovenian civil society, Bar-El traces Žižek’s rise from Marxist philosopher to a political candidate to eventual intellectual celebrity as Žižek perfects his unique performative style and a rhetorical arsenal of “Hegelacanese.” Following 9/11, Žižek’s career as a global op-ed writer and TV commentator married his rhetoric with global events such as the War on Terror, the financial crisis of 2008, and the Arab Spring of 2011. Yet, at the same time, this mainstream popularity, as well as a series of politically incorrect views, almost entirely estranged the Slovenian from the normal workings of academia. Ultimately, this account shows how Žižek harnessed the power of the digital era in his own self-fashioning as a public intellectual.