Subjectivity,Infantile Oedipus,and Symbolization in Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan

Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan have profoundly influenced the theory and practice of psychoanalysis, particularly outside the United States. This paper explores the similarities and differences between their theories, personalities, and influence on the European analytic community in the aftermath of World War II. Parallels are drawn between the paranoid-schizoid position and the imaginary order, as well as between the depressive position and the symbolic order.     

Object-Relations and Cultural Narratives in the Analysis of Racism: Theorizing Subjectivity After Klein and Lacan

This paper discusses two approaches to racism in the psychoanalytic literature—one based on Kleinian object-relations, and another based on Lacan’s theory of language as central to subjectivity. It is argued that the Kleinian method relies on drawing parallels between object-relations at the psychological level and social relations in the external world, and this limits its understanding to a narrow catalogue of psychoanalytic concepts. A Lacanian/post-Lacanian approach begins from the structure of cultural narratives and is more sensitive to social variations. Using examples from anthropology, it is argued that both theories are crucial for a robust analysis of racism.     

Educating Semiosis: Foundational Concepts for an Ecological Edusemiotic

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Many edusemiotic writers have begun to closely align edusemitoics to biosemiotics; the basic logic being that, if the life process can be defined through the...     

Peirce on Truth as the Predestinate Opinion

Abstract: In 1878's ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, Peirce states that truth is the predestinate opinion, or that which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate. Later in his life, though, he would claim both (i) that truth is what would be believed if we could figure out the right method of inquiry and (ii) that, instead of affirming that truth is the predestinate opinion in 1878, he ought to have affirmed that truth is what would be believed if inquiry were carried sufficiently far. The aim of this paper is to provide an account of why the early Peirce endorses the claim that truth is the predestinate opinion and why the late Peirce is compelled to modify that position. I argue that Peirce's early statement that truth is the predestinate opinion is motivated by his theory that all mental action is of the nature of a valid inference and that the later modification of his view is partly motivated by his rejection of that theory.     

查尔斯·桑德斯·皮尔士：物理学家而非哲学家

所有皮尔士的研究者们都应注意到:皮尔士对于哲学本性的理解在今天很不常用.皮尔士首先是一位科学家,其次是一位物理学家,再次才是一位对于哲学感兴趣的物理学家.从根本上说,他的哲学就是科学逻辑.哲学被他视为一种严重依赖于科学的努力,另一方面他对于哲学的理解就是概括意义上的科学.从历史上澄清这一点,对于正确把握和深刻理解皮尔士的相关思想,具有至关重要的意义.皮尔士对于科学本性及哲学与科学关系的论述,对于当代哲学研究也不无启示作用.     

Self-Formation and the speculative: Gadamer and Lacan

Abstract

Gadamer’s project in Truth and Method is as much about truth in the human sciences as it is about human subjectivity, for, following Heidegger, he claims that truth is reducible to method (technical rationality) only if one is misled by old Enlightenment subject/object dualisms. Posing the question of the possibility and nature of truth in scientific thinking, where a strict division between subjective and objective has fallen away, Gadamer belongs, as one of its inaugural figures, to an alternative tradition of philosophical complexity, which implicates environmental systems (culture, ideology, institutions), embedded in language, in the constitution of human subjectivity.

With these theoretical shifts in mind, what caught my attention in a press report concerning the trial of (subsequently convicted) serial killer, Stewart Wilken (“Boetie Boer”), was the strangely anachronistic question that dominated the front page of a Port Elizabeth newspaper: “Boetie: Is he Sick or Evil?” This question, in my view, harks back to a questionable framework of Enlightenment autonomy, which depends upon the easy technical rationality of clear-cut dichotomies. In what follows I hope to show that in acknowledging the role of complex interrelations between cultural and other systems, a tradition of philosophical complexity justifiably claims a more adequate framework for understanding self-formation than that underpinning the discourses at work in Wilken’s trial. I shall draw on Gadamer’s hermeneutic model of an “embedded” subject, which is based on his speculative model of “play” outlined in Truth and Method, and supplement this with Lacan’s psychoanalytic account of subject formation.     

Lacan and Social Psychology

Jacques Lacan kept silent on the topic of social psychology, never referring to it, not even to criticize it. But this has not impeded Lacanian theory from inspiring diverse critical approaches to social psychology. After reviewing these approaches, the article examines Lacan's different explicit positions with respect to psychology, the social and what he called psychology of the social field. This allows us to infer the implicit manner in which Lacan would establish his silent relationship with social psychology. On the basis of this relationship, we outline an original proposal for a Lacanian critical approach to social psychology that might lead to an alternative transindividual metapsychology. Our proposal precisely differs from others in that it attempts to consider and elucidate Lacan's own attitude regarding social psychology.     

Psychoanalysis and theology: Jacques Lacan and Paul

The nature of humanity—or the human situation-has been an area of thought intensely studied by theologians and philosophers for centuries. In more recent times, however, psychology has made serious advances into this field of inquiry. It has been able to provide insights applicable to previous theological ideas. The author brings to the reader's attention his twofold purpose: to present an interpretation of the human situation as understood by Jacques Lacan—as informed by such forerunners as Sigmund Freud and Martin Heidegger— and expressed by psychoanalytic method. These same ideas are then examined in light of the writings of St. Paul. From a sensitive study of these two thinkers the author has been able to draw numerous correlations pertinent to contemporary studies within religion and psychology.is in the private practice of psychotherapy at the Peachtree-Parkwood Mental Health Center in Atlanta. He is an Episcopal priest. For their thoughtful suggestions and editorial assistance, the author is grateful to: Dr. David M. Moss, The Seabury Institute for Pastoral Psychotherapy, and Jean Levenson, M.Div., Darby Printing Company, Atlanta.     

Analysis and decomposition in Peirce

Synthese - Peirce seems to maintain two incompatible theses: that a sentence is multiply analyzable into subject and predicate, and that a sentence is uniquely analyzable as a combination of...     

Objectivity and Subjectivity: an Argument for Rethinking the Philosophy Syllabus

Abstract

An analysis of the concepts of subjectivity and objectivity at work in standard introductions to philosophy reveals an oversight of self-knowledge and tracing the move from a common-sense culture to a scientific one throws up the idea of self-appropriation as the hidden heart of modern thought. The aftermath of the rise of modern physics has been a picture of reality as alienated from our commonly experienced sense of purposes, aims, and intentions as defining our everyday lives, what we may call our “subjectivity”. The existentialist reaction to this has been stifled by this Cartesian dichotomy but the non-sceptical neo-Thomist approach of Bernard Lonergan uncovers the element of self-reflective judgment in knowledge and grounds an act of self-affirmation, thematizing responsibility and agency. I present, with critique, influential moments in the genesis of the received notions of objectivity and of subjectivity, and argue for the inadequacy of Nagel’s problemati-zation of these categories of contemporary thought. With the aim of suggesting a rethink of how philosophy questions are framed in our syllabus I argue two recent papers by colleagues exhibit this very oversight of self-knowledge.     

Peirce: Underdetermination,Agnosticism, and Related Mistakes

There are two ways that we might respond to the underdetermination of theory by data. One response, which we can call the agnostic response, is to suspend judgment: “Where scientific standards cannot guide us, we should believe nothing”. Another response, which we can call the fideist response, is to believe whatever we would like to believe: “If science cannot speak to the question, then we may believe anything without science ever contradicting us”. C.S. Peirce recognized these options and suggested evading the dilemma. It is a Logical Maxim, he suggests, that there could be no genuine underdetermination. This is no longer a viable option in the wake of developments in modern physics, so we must face the dilemma head on. The agnostic and fideist responses to underdetermination represent fundamentally different epistemic viewpoints. Nevertheless, the choice between them is not an unresolvable struggle between incommensurable worldviews. There are legitimate considerations tugging in each direction. Given the balance of these considerations, there should be a modest presumption of agnosticism. This may conflict with Peirce's Logical Maxim, but it preserves all that we can preserve of the Peircean motivation.     

Peirce on facts and true propositions

Peirce maintains that facts and propositions are structurally isomorphic. When we understand how Peirce thinks they are isomorphic, we find that a common objection raised against epistemic conceptions of truth – that there are facts beyond the ken of discovery – holds no water against Peirce’s claim that truth is what would be believed after a sufficiently long and rigorous course of inquiry.     

The singularity of being: Lacan and the immortal within

Drawing on the work of Eric Santner, Slavoj ?i?ek, and Alenka Zupan?i?, this paper constructs a theory of subjective singularity from a Lacanian perspective. It argues that, unlike the "subject" (who comes into existence as a result of symbolic prohibition), or the "person" (who is aligned with the narcissistic conceits of the imaginary), the singular self emerges in response to a galvanizing directive arising from the real. This directive summons the individual to a "character" beyond his or her social and intersubjective investments. Consequently, singularity expresses the individual's nonnegotiable distinctiveness, eccentricity, or idiosyncrasy at the same time as it prevents both symbolic and imaginary closure. It opens to layers of rebelliousness that indicate that there are components of human life that exceed the realm of normative sociality. Indeed, insofar as singularity articulates something about the "undead" pulse of jouissance, it connects the individual to a paradoxical kind of immortality. This does not mean that the individual will not die, but rather that he or she is capable of "transcendent" experiences, such as heightened states of creativity, that (always momentarily) reach "outside" the parameters of mortal life. Such experiences allow the individual to feel "real" in ways that fend off symbolic abduction and psychic death.