Jacques Lacan: Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (1974/1990)

“Here, Lacan points to the dependence of thought and the unconscious on the structure of language. He pits this relation against the notion of thought as grounded in a physical anatomy imagined as an objectified and highly assumptive unity of functions, a singular body. Such a singularity of subjectivity is predicated upon the chain of intersubjectivity, the bonds of civilization, in which it aquires definition. Thus Lacan recognizes that the Aristotelian notion of the subject as object supplies, at the level of the intersubjective, the means of its radical decentering, viz. :

“the ex-sistence [a holding outside] of one more subject for the soul.”

In fact, the physical symptoms of the hysteric, the invasion and disturbance of the body by obsessive thoughts, how to behave, what to say, testifies to the fact that the only relation thought has to the soul-body is one of a differentiating projective ex-sistence.

Lacan argues that the concept of the subject as a composite of thought and soul emerges from efforts to conform thought to the world, for which, under the sway of the aforementioned social bonds, the soul is held responsible. Lacan argues that the object of this responsiblity which passes for “reality” is, in fact, a fantasy, a “grimace of the real”, which simply serves an instinctual purpose: the survivalist perpetuation of thought.”

First part of the book: Television
Translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss, and Annette Michelson

Second part of the book: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment
Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
Edited by Joan Copjec

French edition by Les Editions du Seuil, 1974
Publisher W W Norton, New York/London, 1990
ISBN 0393024962
135 pages

Video of the televised lecture the book is based on
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PDF (updated on 2012-10-6)
See also special issue of October journal, 1987.

François Laruelle: Dictionary of Non-Philosophy (1998/2009)

“Non-philosophy is a concept developed by French philosopher François Laruelle (formerly of the Collège international de philosophie and the University of Paris X: Nanterre) throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Laruelle’s non-philosophy, he claims, should be considered to philosophy what non-Euclidean geometry is to the work of Euclid. It stands in particular opposition to philosophical heirs of Jacques Lacan such as Alain Badiou.”

Keywords: occasionalism, performativity, non-philosophy, psychoanalysis, cloning, Husserl, epistemology, ontology, Heidegger, phenomenology, transcendence, Nietzsche, Kant, non-Euclidean geometry, metaphysics.

Originally published as Dictionnaire de la Non-Philosophie, Editions Kime, Paris, 1998.

Compiled by Nick Srnicek and Ben Woodard
All translations by Taylor Adkins unless otherwise noted.
Free for noncommercial use and distribution with proper attribution.

Review: Ian James (Parrhesia, 2014).

Compilers
Translator
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PDF (updated on 2012-7-26)

Hal Foster: Prosthetic Gods (2004)

“How to imagine not only a new art or architecture but a new self or subject equal to them? In Prosthetic Gods, Hal Foster explores this question through the works and writings of such key modernists as Gauguin and Picasso, F. T. Marinetti and Wyndham Lewis, Adolf Loos and Max Ernst. These diverse figures were all fascinated by fictions of origin, either primordial and tribal or futuristic and technological. In this way, Foster argues, two forms came to dominate modernist art above all others: the primitive and the machine.

Foster begins with the primitivist fantasies of Gauguin and Picasso, which he examines through the Freudian lens of the primal scene. He then turns to the purist obsessions of the Viennese architect Loos, who abhorred all things primitive. Next Foster considers the technophilic subjects propounded by the futurist Marinetti and the vorticist Lewis. These “new egos” are further contrasted with the “bachelor machines” proposed by the dadaist Ernst. Foster also explores extrapolations from the art of the mentally ill in the aesthetic models of Ernst, Paul Klee, and Jean Dubuffet, as well as manipulations of the female body in the surrealist photography of Brassai, Man Ray, and Hans Bellmer. Finally, he examines the impulse to dissolve the conventions of art altogether in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, the scatter pieces of Robert Morris, and the earthworks of Robert Smithson, and traces the evocation of lost objects of desire in sculptural work from Marcel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti to Robert Gober.

Although its title is drawn from Freud, Prosthetic Gods does not impose psychoanalytic theory on modernist art; rather, it sets the two into critical relation and scans the greater historical field that they share.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262062429, 9780262062428
455 pages

Key terms:
Max Ernst, Art Nouveau, Robert Gober, Medusa, Ornament and Crime, Wyndham Lewis, surrealist, psychoanalysis, primitivist, phallus, modernist, Hans Bellmer, Adolf Loos, Dadaist, Le Corbusier, apotropaic, Dada, Paul Gauguin, Paul Klee, vorticist

Reviews: Cohen (CAA Reviews 2005), Bowring (Frieze 2005), Hopkins (Papers of Surrealism 2005), Cooper (Art Bulletin 2006).

Publisher

PDF, PDF (5 MB, updated on 2016-12-13)