radical philosophy

Realism and moral being

Andrew Collier, who died on 3 July after more than a decade living with cancer, was a member of the Radical Philosophy editorial collective during the 1990s and a longstanding contributor to the journal. Born in Edmonton, North London, towards the end of World War II, he attended Bedford College, University of London (later …

Always historicize?

Sally Alexander and Barbara Taylor, eds, History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2013. 347 pp., £57.50 hb, 978 0 23011 336 7

‘Always historicize!’ has been a fashionable rallying call in recent times. Yet only a minority of those who scrutinize the workings of mind or body …

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 – …

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 …

Noam Chomsky

Peter Hallward I’d like to start by asking you about some of your basic philosophical principles, starting with your understanding of human freedom and creativity. In the modern European tradition I’m most familiar with, freedom is a dominant philosophical theme from Descartes through Rousseau to Kant. With Kant we have an affirmation …

David Macey, 1949-2011

David Macey died from complications of lung cancer on 7 October. He embodied the paradox of being a fine public intellectual while remaining an intenselyprivate person. He was one of the best intellectual historians of his generation and added appreciably to scholarly knowledge, yet did his most significant work as a freelance writer …

Who Was Oscar Masotta? Response to Derbyshire

Philip Derbyshire (‘Who Was Oscar Masotta? Psychoanalysisin Argentina’, RP 158) should be commended for his insightful consideration of the literary and psychoanalytic writings of Oscar Masotta, one of the most important Argentine intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s. I would like to make a case for juxtaposing these texts with Masotta’s idiosyncratic and interdisciplinary explorations …

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

Remembering Adorno

Enigma variation

Oedipus as figure

Norman O. Brown, 1913–2002

‘Siegfried Kracauer’, University of Birmingham, 13–14 September 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

Psychoanalysis and politics

Wishful theory and sexual politics

Across the last two or three decades identity and desire have been ʻtheorizedʼ relentlessly. Influences have been diverse: I remember especially the impact, for gay writing, of Barthesʼ dream, or plea, in 1975, for a radical sexual diversity wherein there would no longer be homosexuality (singular) but homosexualities, a plural so radical it ʻwill baffle any centred, …

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 …

Demanding approval