Arrested Histories: A Response to Françoise Davoine

This commentary examines the psychoanalytic drama narrated by Françoise Davoine in terms of the dream at its crossroads: a site within the analysis (and its dramatic narrative) in which the dead and the living change places and the untold stories of the patient's and analyst's mothers begin to emerge. Davoine's narrative recounts the emergence of a language in which the hidden stories become entangled with each other as well as the breakdown of signification in which an uninscribed history appears on the scene. Ultimately the analysis turns around an arrest of signification, a form of madness that reveals the violent history at the heart of the exchanges enacted in the analytic encounter. This is also the point, I suggest, at which the possibility of a new relation to history and a new form of address open up.     

Analytic Work in the Bridge World: Commentary on Paper by Françoise Davoine

This discussion considers the elements of mythos and story telling that frame the case material Françoise Davoine offers and analyzes. In this discussion, I highlight the role of nachtraglichkeit, the nonlinearity of time and temporality that shapes the key events in this clinical narrative. I consider the relational aspects of countertransference, enactment, and personal analysis that shape Davoine's analytic listening and the uncanny effects of historical trauma that enter both analyst and analysand. This discussion also considers the interlocking of speech effects and temporality, the role of unconscious dialogues across history and time, that arise unbidden in clinical work. The analyst's freedom to live imaginatively in a process somewhat outside her clinical management is viewed as a key to the freeing of processes of mourning and rehabilitation in the patient.     

The Laruellean Clinamen: François Laruelle and French Atomism

According to François Laruelle, French thought has been unduly influenced by corpuscular or atomist thinking, yet Laruelle has himself employed key atomist terms—in particular, that of the clinamen or swerve—in framing his own style of thought. This essay looks at this tension between atomism and anti-atomism in Laruelle’s thought, taking the measure of his contribution to a larger stream of postwar French thinking about the relevance and stakes of ancient atomism. Its contention is that Laruelle subtly but really outlines a quantum theoretical resumption of ancient atomist philosophy—one that deserves closer attention and comparative study in the larger context of French philosophical interest in the atomists. A first section of the paper briefly describes Laruelle’s general project, along with his claim that he differs from his contemporaries because he uniquely escapes the dangers of what he calls corpuscular thought. A second section addresses the apparent tension between Laruelle’s claim to produce a non-corpuscular thinking and his consistent recent use of the atomist image of the clinamen, ultimately arguing that Laruelle sides with the clinamen against two forms of corpuscularity supposedly avoided by the clinamen itself but nonetheless usefully embodied in atomist thought. The final section of the paper draws up in preliminary terms a comparison between Laruelle’s understanding of his relationship to atomism and that of his contemporaries, focusing in particular on Alain Badiou.     

Nevertheless,she persisted (in science research): Enhancing women students’ science research motivation and belonging through communal goals

Social Psychology of Education - There is no doubt that connections with other people motivate behavior; yet science is stereotyped as being lonely work devoid of communal connections. Drawing from...     

What gives? Getting over the subject: François Raffoul,Heidegger and the Subject

Continental Philosophy Review -     

Cyberbullying: Challenges and opportunities for a research program—A response to Olweus (2012)

Olweus raises some important issues, but I argue that he underestimates the impact of cyberbullying on a research programme that he has done so much to promote. Cyberbullying has a number of distinctive features that differentiate it from traditional bullying. Cyberbullying provides a new challenge to the hard core (definitional criteria separating bullying from aggression). It also provides opportunities, in terms of a broader disciplinary base, greater permeability of age and context barriers, and new theoretical possibilities.