radical philosophy

The dream is a fragment

An appreciation and practice of the fragment is a feature of all European Romanticism, but it was in early German (or ‘Jena’) Romanticism, and most of all in the work of Friedrich Schlegel, that the concept of ‘the fragment’ was philosophically determined. Indeed, the fragment has been called ‘the central philosophical concept of early German …

Name of the Father, ‘One’ of the Mother: From Beauvoir to Lacan

To Our Lady of the Pillar in Zaragossa, perched on her column, ‘But there is something more, a puissance beyond the phallus.’

If I take a few aspects of the thought of Jacques Lacan, and investigate their relation to Simone de Beauvoir around one specific point, I have no intention of making him out – …

Flickers

Bruno Bosteels, Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis and Religion in Times of Terror, Verso, London and New York, 2012. 326 pp., £19.99 pb., 978 1 84467 755 9.

Bruno Bosteels is probably best known to readers of Radical Philosophy as translator of and commentator on the work of Alain Badiou …

Jean Laplanche, 1924–2012

Jean Laplanche, one of Europe’s most eminent and original psychoanalytic thinkers, died on 6 May, at the age of 87. His death brings to an end a remarkable intellectual career dedicated to the meticulous analysis and rigorous critical expansion of the Freudian discovery. Laplanche was born on 21 June 1924 to a …

Who was Oscar Masotta?

As Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s sardonic detective Pepe Carvalho ruefully observed, in a dictionary of Argentine clichés, psychoanalysis would have a crucial place, along with ‘tango and the disappeared’.1 ‘One’ knows that along with Paris, Buenos Aires is one of the centres of psychoanalytic practice, and one of the leading training centres …

Mirrors without images

Re-presentation of the repressed: The political revolution of the neo-avant-garde

Enigma variation

Oedipus as figure

Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002

The introduction of the Oedipus Complex and the reinvention of instinct

Philippe Van Haute traces the evolution of the relation between ‘normality’ and pathology in Freud’s additions to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.

Family values

The sword and the bridge

History and the process of mourning in Hegel and Freud

Psychoanalysis and politics

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche is the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day. Setting out from a critical reconstruction of Freudʼs terminology, he has developed a systematic rethinking of psychoanalytic metapsychology under the heading of a ʻgeneral theory of seductionʼ. Still best known in Britain for his early joint work with Pontalis – ʻFantasy …

Childhood experience and the image of utopia

Cracking the cultural code

‘Radical evil’ revived

Critical reproblemization

It was a matter of analyzing … the problemizations through which being offers itself to be, necessarily thought – and the practices on the basis of which these problemizations are formed.

Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure 1

Michel Foucault is well known for having periodically redescribed his previous studies in light of …