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International Symposium in Phenomenology

ABSTRACTS 2011

 

 

 

 

"Freud to Lacan in Italy: The Impact of Phenomenology?"

Maria Aristodemou (Birkbeck College, London)

Although Freud was a frequent visitor to Italy, and famously used the topography of Rome as a metaphor for mapping mental life, it wasn’t until 1901, that is, after publication of The Interpretation of Dreams, that he finally succeeded in reaching Rome. Freud’s inhibition, and inspiration, by Rome will be part of this paper. Lacan’s visit to Rome in 1953, was also auspicious, having been preceded by a split between the Paris Psychoanalytic Association (SPP) and the newly formed French Psychoanalytic Association (SPF) which Lacan had helped found. Lacan chose the occasion of his now well-known Rome Discourse to remonstrate against the turn Freud’s followers had taken, reserving his scathing and mocking criticism for ego psychologists in particular, before settling to the task of heralding his own return to Freud. What took place in the half-century or so between the two men’s visits? A number of intellectual developments of course had intervened, most notably the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s General Course in Structural Linguistics (1916) without which there probably would have been no Lacan. A less discussed yet also influential development to have reached Lacan’s Paris came not from Switzerland but from Germany and in particular from the teaching of Martin Heidegger. This paper will use a case example from one of Lacan’s much maligned ego psychology colleagues, Ernst Kris, and Lacan’s compulsion to repeat this example, to address the issue of Lacan’s debt to Heidegger. The “fresh brains case” as it has come to be called, will be used to explore Lacan’s taste for others thinkers, other ideas and other brains: the fresh brains served by Heidegger in particular.

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"De la fonction politico-clinique du témoignage : entre historicité et extériorité"

Rodrigo De La Fabián (Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago-Chile)

Dans mon article je fais une critique de la notion de reconnaissance chez Axel Honneth en utilisant la distinction entre intelligibilité, reconnaissabilité (recognizability), reconnaissance et appréhension chez Judith Butler et la notion de témoignage chez Giorgio Agamben. Mon hypothèse est que la théorie de la reconnaissance garde dans son cœur une dimension a-historique, une sorte de proto-pacte de reconnaissance qui empêche de penser certaines formes d’exclusion qui situent la victime en dehors du champ de reconnaissabilité. La reconnaissance, chez Butler, est possible seulement entre sujets qui se trouvent dans un rapport historico-contingente où la reconnaissabilité a crée ses conditions de possibilité. Tandis que l’appréhension est un rapport qui est établit lorsque les conditions de reconnaissabilité sont absentes. Le témoignage, donc, est la conséquence politique de l’appréhension et est conditionné par elle. Finalement, j’essaye de montrer comment cette différence entre appréhension et reconnaissance est fondamentale dans la clinique psychanalytique.

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“Acts of Psychoanalysis: From Freud’s Moses to Derrida’s Archive”

Lyat Friedman

In 1939, on the eve of WWII, Freud published the third part of “Moses and Monotheism”, which he had begun writing in 1934. In this essay Freud makes two provoking claims: First, Moses was an Egyptian prince on the run, because of his monotheistic beliefs, who was killed by the Hebraic people whom he chose and helped flee; Second, while Judaism is a religion that represses the murder of its leader, sublimated and elevated to the rank of God, Christianity practices the ritual revelation of patricide, bringing down its God to the level of human flesh. Christianity holds the Jewish people responsible for not admitting the murder of the father, according to Freud. Yet “Moses and Monotheism” does more than make provocations or reveal Freud’s self-analysis (as Peter Gay, Ernest Jones, and even Yosef-Hayim Yerushalmi claim). It is a text that operates according to psychoanalytic therapeutic techniques: It makes provoking claims so as to reveal its readers’ defence mechanisms and in so doing it performs unconscious shifts in its readers’ resistances.

This paper will follow the workings of “Moses and Monotheism.” It will examine the cure it offers by delineating the effects it has had on two particular responses to it, very different in kind. First Yerushalmi’s attempt to expose the Jewish foundations of psychoanalysis; Second Edward Said’s attempt to compare Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people to the Christian condemnation of the Jews. Two additional responses will be examined: First Derrida’s response to Yerushami, exposing the non-historical foundation of Yerushalmi’s text. Second, Jacqueline Rose’s response to Said, confessing blame and admitting guilt. While Yerushalmi’s response attempts to exonerate the Jewish people, Said seeks to convict the Israelis and in so doing he acquits the Jews. Rose joins in the condemnations, absolving herself of wrongdoing by admitting her guilt. While these thinkers play intellectual finger pointing, Derrida exposes a ghostly spectacle, repeating Freud’s last act of making conscious the infantile and archaic blame of patricide. If Freud’s last act was an attempt transform the phenomenon of guilt and blame, the responses to his act only retrain the ferocious violence of culpability. The effects re-emerge in deviated forms.

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"Lacan's body"

Ari Hirvonen (University of Helsinki)

According to Colette Solar, it has been known from the beginning of Freud's work, from the first deciphering of hysterical symptoms that the unconscious is not without a relation to the body. For her, the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) body is reality. By this she means that the body is not primary but something that is constructed. One is not born with a body and there is a difference between the body and the organism. The animal, which is an organism, does not have a body. However, the body seems to be one of the main problems in Lacan's corpus. Is the body nothing but something that is always already subjected to the imaginary and the symbolic? Is there something that would be beyond this body -- the real body? If there is any possibility to speak about it, what this (perhaps impossible) body would be?

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"Pourquoi n'y a–t-il pas de vérité de la vérité?"

Gilson Iannini (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto – Brésil)

Ce travail examine le problème des rapports entre style et vérité sous la perspective de la critique du métalangage effectuée par Jacques Lacan. Le point de départ de la réflexion est la détection d’une double injonction de la vérité dans la reconstruction lacanienne de la psychanalyse: (i) il y a de la vérité; (ii) il n’y a pas de vérité de la vérité. Cette double injonction prête à la conception lacanienne de la vérité un caractère tout aussi double, à la fois dialectique et sceptique : la vérité est un processus structuré ; il n’y a pas de critères généraux de validation de vérités. Ainsi, la principale note caractéristique de la vérité serait sa résistance au savoir. L’objectif central du travail est d’éclaircir et déployer l’impasse présente dans la question: que signifie-t-il d’affirmer la vérité sans l’appui d’un métalangage, c’est-à-dire sans qu’il soit possible de dire la vérité sur la vérité ? Je m’intéresse aussi aux implications de cette impossibilité dans la Dichtung lacanienne elle-même, c’est-à-dire les effets discursifs et stylistiques de la réfraction de la vérité. Compte tenu de l’impossibilité du métalangage et du co-fonctionnement conséquent de la science et du style dans la pratique discursive et dans l’écriture conceptuelle de la psychanalyse, la principale thèse défendue ici établit que le mi-dire est la loi formelle d’énonciation et d’écriture de la vérité.

”Why there is no truth of the truth”

Gilson Iannini (Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto – Brasil)

The present study investigates the question of the relations between style and truth from the perspective of the critique of metalanguage as proposed by Jacques Lacan. I start by identifying a double injunction of the truth in the lacanian reconstruction of psychoanalysis: (i) there is truth; (ii) there is not truth of the truth. This double injunction gives the lacanian conception of the truth a double character, insofar as it is at the same time dialectical and skeptical: the truth is conceived as a structured process; there are not general criteria for the validation of truths. Thus, according to Lacan, the most remarkable feature of the truth is its resistance to knowledge. The main purpose of the present study is to unfold and to explain the dilemma generated by the following question: what does it mean to assert the truth without the support of a metalanguage, if metalanguage is here defined as the impossibility of saying the truth about the truth? I also explore the implications of the impossibility of metalanguage in the lacanian Dichtung itself, that is to say, the effects of the refraction of the truth concerning speech and style. The main thesis to be here argued for is that the half-saying
(mi-dire) is the formal law of the utterance and writing of the truth.

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"Un inceste transcendantal : au croisement de la phénoménologie et de la psychanalyse"

Jacob Rogozinski (Université de Strasbourg)

Dans la Krisis, Husserl compare la relation entre phénoménologie et psychologie à celle de "deux sœurs inséparablement liées" par "l'inceste de l'identité et de la différence du moi psychologique et du moi transcendantal". Nous savons cependant que le projet husserlien de fonder une nouvelle science de la psyché sur la base de la phénoménologie transcendantale a historiquement échoué. Je fais l'hypothèse que c'est la psychanalyse qui occupe aujourd'hui la place de cette "science" mort-née, et je réexaminerai dans cette perspective les rapports qui se nouent entre la pensée de Husserl et celle de Freud. Après avoir délimité le domaine de la psychanalyse et celui de la phénoménologie et déterminé le statut qu'elles assignent au sujet, je m'efforcerai de repérer les points de rencontre où la genèse du sujet freudien vient croiser la genèse du moi transcendantal : leur point de départ dans un état d'indifférenciation originel, le processus de séparation entre le moi et l'autre, le primat du toucher dans la constitution du moi. Je tenterai de confronter l'égologie phénoménologique à certaines élaborations de la psychanalyse, et notamment à la conception du "moi-peau" développée par D. Anzieu.

In the Krisis, Husserl compares the relation between phenomenology and psychology to that of "two sisters, inseparably bound" by "the incest of the identity and the difference of the psychological and the transcendental Ego". We know however that the Husserlian project to establish a new science of the psyche on the basis of the transcendental phenomenology historically failed. I make the hypothesis that it is the psychoanalysis which occupies today the place of this stillborn "science", and I shall revise in this perspective the relation between the thought of Husserl and that of Freud. After having demarcated the domain of psychoanalysis and that of phenomenology and determined the status which they assign to the subject, I shall try to locate the meeting places where the genesis of the Freudian subject comes to cross the genesis of the transcendental Ego : their point of departure in an original state of non-differentiation, the process of separation between the Ego and the other one, the primacy of touching in the constitution of the Ego. I shall try to confront the phenomenological egology to some psychoanalytical elaborations, especially to Anzieu's conception of the "Ego-skin".

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"Towards a Phenomenology of Repression - a Husserlian Reply to the Freudian Challenge"

Nicholas Smith (Södertörns högskola, Stockholm)

This is the first book-length philosophical study of Husserl’s
transcendental phenomenology and Freud’s theory of the unconscious.
The book investigates the possibility for Husserl’s transcendental
phenomenology to clarify Freud’s concept of the unconscious with a
focus on the theory of repression as its centre. Repression is the
unconscious activity of pushing something away from consciousness,
while making sure that it remains active as something foreign within
us. How this is possible is the main problem addressed in the work. Unlike previous literature (including Ricœur, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida) this book makes full use of the resources of genetic phenomenology and passivity in the attempt to clarify the Freudian unconscious. The central argument developed is that the structure of the lebendige Gegenwart as the core of Husserl’s theory of passivity consists of preliminary forms of bodily kinaesthesia, feelings and drives in a constantly ongoing process where repression occurs as a necessary part of all constitution. The clarification of Freudian repression thus takes place by showing how it presupposes a broad conception of consciousness such as that presented by Husserl’s
genetic phenomenology. By arguing that “repression” is central to any
philosophical account of subjectivity, this book takes on the most
distinct challenge to philosophy posed by Freud. (http://su.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:357531&rvn=1 )

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"Psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and the problem of nature in contemporary philosophy of science"

Richard Theisen Simanke (Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil)

This paper aims at presenting the essentials of a research project involving Freudian psychoanalysis, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and contemporary philosophy of science. This project can be shortly described by the following statements: (1) Freud always maintained an explicit and consistent naturalistic stance. He sought with no ambiguity to place his psychoanalysis in the field of the sciences of nature, and his theoretical, clinical and scientific accomplishments can only be fully understood in the context of this scientific naturalism. (2) A qualified concept of nature is needed in order to grasp the specificity of Freud’s naturalism. Freud’s naturalism is neither mechanistic, nor atomistic and, instead, points to a conception of nature as history or process which needs to be carefully systematized in order to make full sense of it and its specific conception of the continuity between nature and cultural history. (3) An important part of the materials and guidelines for this task can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. A sophisticated philosophical reflection – however incomplete – on a philosophy of nature can be found in his work which could give contemporary scientific naturalism a new sense. Freudian psychoanalysis can then appear as an early and fairly exemplary case of this renewed concept of natural science.

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“Spinoza avec Luther? Some Thoughts on Freudo-Lacanian Ethics”

Herman Westerink (Vienna)

In his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis Lacan criticizes an intellectual tradition that he identifies as “essentially hedonist” because of the convergence of pleasure and the good, and which he associates with an Aristotelean-Thomistic ethics continued in utilitarianism and ego psychology. Lacan lines up with a number of pre-psychoanalytic authors, both philosophers and theologians that supposedly thematized the kind of problems that Freud’s intellectual project addresses. The importance of Spinoza has already been recognized by others: Lacanian ethics has a Spinozian motto – “desire is the very essence of man” – and character. But how does this relate to another important author Lacan – some what surprisingly – calls upon, namely Luther, claiming that “the mad man from Wittenberg” also preludes notions to which Freud gave his approval: man’s “evil” desire as essential to the human condition, and the radical denial of the good, ort he fundamentally bad character of the relation between men. Could we then read Lacan’s seminar as “Spinoza avec Luther”?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

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August 21, 2010