The struggle to define the union of two people under the law has continually produced division. Within America the states were divided; the Supreme Court as a Judicial body was divided in a vote of 5 to 4; the arguments anticipating the vote revealed that individual Justices of the Court were themselves subjectively divided. Justice [...]
Because psychoanalysis has a language of its own that arises in a singular act of a particular subject Lacan later called speaking being. Psychoanalysis stands, in principio, if not de facto, in opposition to the universal achievements of humanity. There is no Nobel Prize for it, no certificates for achievements in the field. In short, [...]
In one of his rare direct comments on the politics of left and right in Seminar VII, Lacan has recourse to terms from the Elizabethan theatre.3 The left wing intellectual is characterized as a fool and the right wing intellectual a knave. The fool – for example from King Lear – was someone who might [...]
“According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data, the Department of Homeland Security deported 414,481 people in fiscal year 2014, down from 438,421 the year before.”1 This drop in numbers may be due in part to the deferments by the Dream Act. In June 2012 President Obama initiated the well-known Dream Act, officially named Deferred [...]
The story takes place in the 1960s, at the peak of modern advertising’s rise to glory2, when marketing, the empire of images, and consumer capitalism began to transform human life. The characters are organized around an advertising agency and the fictional events are intertwined with the historical and social events of the decade. One of [...]
Chanson Française owes its origins of course to the Chanson Réaliste moment of Aristide Bruant and Le Chat Noir around 1893 that brought young intellectuals together with the demi monde of artists, workers and prostitutes. ‘People spoke a lot about sexuality’, affirms Clark, ‘and it produced some strange and dark characters’. Hélène Hazera is even [...]
and come to mean something like “selfishness” or “self-obsession”, thereby obscuring Freud’s more direct reference to the Greek myth: just as Narcissus” exclusively scopic pleasure in his own reflection led him to starve to death, so Freud refers to the megalomaniac dimensions of paraphrenia and the radical withdrawal of libido from the “external world”. Moreover, [...]
In order for something to exist in the full sense of the word, it must first be named and recognized. The unconscious certainly existed before Freud, but in the absence of a name, an elaboration, and a community of the faithful, it could not join, then sublate, the bacchanal of existence. Bearing this in mind, [...]
Two events that took place in New York City last spring and another in France last year suffice to illustrate the singularity of our respective national sensitivities when it comes to dealing with free speech. The first was the heated debate sparked off by a group of writers protesting in a letter about PEN America’s [...]
