Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1987"

The Imaginary Institution of Society

Abstract: "[T]he most original, ambitious, and reflective attempt to think through the liberating mediation of history, society, external and internal nature once again as praxis". -- Ju rgen Habermas, "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity" "Castoriadis's "The Imaginary Institution of Society" is a work of great power and originality. As a work of social theory, I would argue that it belongs in a class with the writings of Habermas and Arendt". -- Jay Bernstein, University of Essex This is one of the most original and important works of contemporary European thought. First published in France in 1975, it is the major theoretical work of one of the foremost thinkers in Europe today. Castoriadis offers a brilliant and far-reaching analysis of the unique character of the social-historical world and its relations to the individual, to language, and to nature. He argues that most traditional conceptions of society and history overlook the essential feature of the social-historical world, namely that this world is not articulated once and for all but is in each case the creation of the society concerned. In emphasizing the element of creativity, Castoriadis opens the way for rethinking political theory and practice in terms of the autonomous and explicit self-institution of society.

Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

Abstract: Desire, Rhetoric, and Recognition in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit The Ontology of Desire Bodily Paradoxes: Lordship and Bondage Historical Desires: The French Reception of Hegel Kojeve: Desire and Historical Agency Hyppolite: Desire, Transcience, and the Absolute From Hegel to Sartre Sartre: The Imaginary Pusuit of Being Image, Emotion, and Desire The Strategies of Pre-reflective Choice: Existential Desire in Being and Nothingness Trouble and Longing: The Circle of Sexual Desire in Being and Nothingness Desire and Recognition in Saint Genet and The Family Idiot The Life and Death Struggles of Desire: Hegel and Contemporary French Theory A Questionable Patrilieage: (Post-) Hegelian Themes in Derrida and Foucault Lacan: The Opacity of Desire Deleuze: From Slave Morality to Productive Desire Foucault: Dialectics Unmoored Final Reflections on the "Overcoming" of Hegel

In the Country of Last Things

Abstract: 'That is how it works in the City. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense . . .' This is the story of Anna Blume and her journey to find her lost brother, William, in the unnamed City. Like the City itself, however, it is a journey that is doomed, and so all that is left is Anna's unwritten account of what happened. Paul Auster takes us to an unspecified and devastated world in which the self disappears amidst the horrors that surround us. But this is not just an imaginary, futuristic world: like the settings of Kafka stories, it is one that echoes our own, and in doing so addresses some of our darker legacies. In the Country of Last Things is a tense, psychological take on the dystopian novel. It continues Auster's deep exploration of his central themes: the modern city, the mysteries of storytelling, and the elusive and unstable nature of truth.

Walter Pater: The Aesthetic Moment

Abstract: Foreword Part I. Introduction Section 1. Pater Criticism Section 2. Historical Preliminaries: 1. Art as creation 2. Art as mimesis Part II. Autonomous Art Section 3. The Starting Point: 1. Scepticism 2. The essay 3. Defining human existence 4. Expression Section 4. Defining Art: 1. 'Art for art's sake' 2. Impressionism 3. Style Section 5. The Problem of Orientation: 1. Beauty 2. 'Postscript' Part III. Art and History Section 6. What Is History?: 1. Hegelian schematism 2. Historicity 3. 'House Beautiful' Section 7. The Limits of Historical Legitimation: 1. Plato and Platonism 2. Glaston de Latour Part IV. Art and Myth Section 8. The Ancient Gods: 1. Cult and ritual 2. 'The myth of Demeter and Persephone' 3. 'A study of Dionysis' Section 9. The Limits of Mythical Legitimation: 1. 'Apollo in Picardy' 2. Pater and Nietzche Part V. The Aesthetic Existence Section 10. Marius the Epicurean: 1. The form 2. The problem Section 11. Imaginary Portraits: 1. The form 2. 'A Prince of Court Painters' 3. Denys l'Auxerrois' 4. 'Sebastian van Storck' 5. 'Duke Carl of Rosenmold' Conclusion Notes Bibliography Biographical addendum Index of names Index of subjects.

Imaginary Relations: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism

Abstract: This book sets out to clarify the nature of the aesthetic as a category within the theory of historical materialism. It opens with an analysis of Marx's brief discussion of Greek art in the Grundrisse, moves through a series of readings of specifically bourgeois texts, including those of Ruskin, G.M. Hopkins, Nietzsche and Henry James, and then to the terrain of Marxism in the concepts of history underwriting the work of Fredric Jameson and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sprinkler detours through the recent works of Perry Anderson to set the stage for a systematic consideration of the theoretical itinerary and continuing relevance of the contributions of Louis Althusser. Imaginary Relations is a cogently argued attempt to shift the terrain of Marxist theorizing about art from the domain of ideology considered as simply false consciousness to a concept of art which makes aesthetic texts sources of empirical data about the real, historical world.

Oral Poetry and History

Abstract: ASOUTH AFRICAN poet recalls how in the early nineteenth century the Xhosa king Hintsa (c. 1790-1835) regularly appeared before his people to conduct the affairs of the nation. A bard approached the court one day, and, with a familiar image from the oral tradition, moved at once to transform the moiling crowd into a responding audience: "The late-riser has seen nothing, / He will never see the python uncoil!" The lines were ambiguous, but it was quickly apparent that they told of a lack of military preparation for a war that seemed imminent. As he revealed his foreboding, the poet strode through the throng to the motionless figure of the king. His theme was urgent, the realities of contemporary history were plain; to relate theme and reality, he constructed a set of imaginary events having to do with forbidden sexual dalliance. He boldly addressed the king with such epithets as "You-who-expose-your-loinsto-the-door" and "Thrower-forward-of-the-penis / (Not-to-anyonein-particular)," imposing upon him the role of fictional miscreant. He combined fanciful image with his perception of historical event to create a metaphorical admonition: the king was dawdling while disaster menaced, his traditional accountability to the people emphasized by his supposed self-indulgence. "The girls do not wipe their bottoms, / They fear being pricked in the ass!" the poet cried. "[W]hat do the intonjane [puberty ritual] girls do / When the battle of the penises approaches?" In the end, the images of reality and fantasy clearly bonded, the poet turned on the king: "Eee, what is the matter with this man / That his testicles are swollen? / Is it because he

The Witty Butcher's Wife: Freud, Lacan, and the Conversion of Resistance to Theory

Abstract: I want to consider in this essay the meaning of the importance of identification in desire. One of the most fruitful trends in psychoanalytic thought of the last decade is a rediscovery of the extraordinary significance of narcissism, or of the specular conditions of any playing out of desire, any establishing of relations, any symbolizing activity. This trend can be seen as a critical reaction against Lacan's privileging of the Symbolic order over the Imaginary as the dimension in which negativity of the really productive and interesting kind occurs, in which speech or language in the full sense goes on. The notion of entry into the Symbolic order via castration as the condition of full speech went along it seemed with the denunciation of the Imaginary or the mirror-stage, like American ego-psychology, as the locus of delusion-as the dimension of mystification which individual subjects should get over and which psychoanalytic theory should successfully altogether avoid. To the extent that Lacan's indictment of the Imaginary sounded like a dismissal of its importance, to the extent that the denunciation of ego psychology sounded like a discouragement against thinking about the ego, it was inevitable that the pendulum should eventually swing the other way, toward a reemphasis on the importance, persistence, unavoidability, and productiveness of the Imaginary

Fantasía creadora y componente imaginario en la obra literaria

Abstract: This article intends to be a concrete contribution to the study of the imaginary component in literary works, within the field of the Poetics of the Imaginary. It also deals with its psycological-anthropological bases and its outstanding features in the text. You can find the roots for this component in the so-called "creative fantasy", from a psycological-psycoanalistic perspective. After Freud's and his disciples' investigations upon unconscious, Psychoanalistic criticism, Psycocritics, Mytocritics and Mytoanalysis have tried to give a satisfactory explanation to the meaning of literary works -these understood as a result of the actualization of the unconscious through latent fantasy. But only the Poetics of the Imaginary, in its most recent studies, associates symbols -consequences of pulsional movements-, with the material structures of the text, through what Garcia Berrio has denominated, "schemes of fantastic spatialitation".

“Break Out, Be There!”

Abstract: I, too, dislike it," begins Marianne Moore in her poem on "Poetry." But dislike turns out to be only part of the picture, for, as we discover by the end of the poem, she also delights in the poet's "imaginary gardens with real toads in them." For me, similar mixed emotions well up around the subject of creativity. Part of what gets my emotions churn ing stems from the word itself. "Creativ ity." Certainly it has a pleasing ring, but it also has a mushy, unprincipled quality that's enough to make any English teacher queasy. In the past decade or so, it has become a catchword for all kinds of training and development programs, and there are people out there making money on "creative management," "creative marketing," "creative coffee breaks. ..." These objectives may be worthy, but occasionally I find myself wondering what they're doing in Mari anne Moore's garden and in the world of creativity represented by, say, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pablo Picasso, and Albert Einstein. Actually, however, the confusion of meaning is nothing new. As a part of both pop culture and psychological jargon, "creativity" is used to cover

Classical Cinema and the Spectator

Abstract: It is a known fact that Psycho (A. Hitchcock, 1960) is one of the many American films that since c. 1940 have been inspired by the psychoanalytic theory of Freud. At the same time it is a film that has incorporated in its plot structure the details of the so-called psychoanalytic treatment. I shall not go deeper into the reasons for the great interest of the American cinema in psychoanalysis, but it seems obvious to agree with Marc Vernet's suggestion that the psychoanalytic theory and method were very useful with regard to the classical, narrative structure of the Hollywood cinema; a structure that is characterized by a catharsis model by which an enigma has to be solved and the truth has to be discovered,1. In these series of films the solving of the problem is given to us through a psychoanalytic interpretation. However, the unriddling of the mystery does not always guarantee the patient's recovery. More often it is not the therapeutic treatment as such that has a salutary effect, but the loving attitude of the therapeutist. When Dr. Burlos, in Spellbound (A. Hitchcock, 1945), says to the therapeutist Constance Peterson (played by Ingrid Bergman) that a psychoanalyst in love with the patient is a bad therapeutist (expressing thereby one of the classical laws of psychoanalytic theory), he is of course wrong because every Hollywood film (including Spellbound) will prove the opposite to be true. In spite of this deviation from Freudian orthodoxy, the relation between Hollywood and Freud has proved to be more than a superficial flirtation and has produced a number of interesting films. Semiotics and psychoanalysis At the beginning of the seventies, a renewed contact between cinema and psychoanalysis took place, but this time on a theoretical level. One of the most influential works in this field was produced by the French film semiotician Christian Metz, who in 1977 published a volume of four essays: Le signifiant imaginaire. The whole of this volume centers around the question of how the functioning of the cinematic institution can be clarified by the psychoanalytic theory. Metz considered the cinematic institution not only as a film-industrial constellation, but also as a "mental machinery" absorbed by the public. This mental machinery consists of the ideological characteristics of the Hollywood cinema (because it is only this classical type of film that Metz is concerned with), that responds to an audience who is willing to pay to see it, i.e. who want to see Hollywood films. Metz's work now focuses exclusively on the way in which this cinematic institution, this historically developed relation between cinema and audience, can be clarified by psychoanalytic theory. In the several essays this general problem is reduced to more specific questions, such as the imaginary qualities of the filmic image, the voyeuristic position of the spectator, the mechanisms of fetishism, the relation between film and dream, etc. In the next pages I will try to confront a film - Psycho - that is partly a product of the meeting between Hollywood and psychoanalysis, with one of the most important theoretical insights that Metz has developed in the book just mentioned. It is an aspect of Metz's work in which he investigates the position of the spectator in relation to the film. What will be at stake in this essay is the question to what extent Psycho, as a filmic textual system, can confirm the remarks Metz has made concerning the way a Hollywood film positions the spectator. A theory of subjectivity In "Histoire/Discours (Note sur deux voyeurismes)" (one of the four essays of Le signifiant imaginaire) Metz gives a very important start to the development of a theory of subjectivity in film. The goal of a theory of the subject can, in the words of J. Caughie, be described as "an account of the determinations and pressures which operate on individuals in terms of the places they come to occupy within the formations (social, textual, sexual, familial, discursive) which provide the sites of their activity. …

Absent Father, Passive Son: The Dilemma of Rickie Elliott in The Longest Journey

Abstract: The fundamental task of every son, as the neo-Freudian Jacques Lacan has pointed out, is to come to terms with his father. In order to do so, he must abandon the imaginary state of non-differentiation or fusion with the mother to assume his symbolic place within the family triad. Not only the child's predecessor within the family, but the symbolic embodiment of law and language, the father is the transcendent signifier whose legacy is orderly progression both in life and in narrative. Since language expresses desire, which originates in absence, the child's acknowledgment of the father is accompanied by a permanent sense of loss. Accordingly, the child's accommodation is always problematical and imperfect. The imperfect outcome of this universal struggle gets expressed in the nature of narrative itself: although primarily linear and orderly, all narrative collapses at times into disorder-into digression, evasion, omission, ambiguity, and contradiction. Some narratives irretrievably founder on the way, either broken on the hard rock of Scylla, the father, or swallowed by the chaos and absorption of the mother, Charybdis.' The Longest Journey is such a narrative. While its unfolding appears to be linear, it is actually circular and repetitious. Finally it collapses upon itself. The most unconscious and personal of Forster's published novels, The Longest Journey was, in Forster's words, the one he was "most glad to have written."2 He nevertheless was regretfully aware that it was seriously flawed. Critics have generally agreed. Indeed, the book suffers from a number of problems, among them the author's ambivalence

Nabokov/Cabrera Infante: True Imaginary Lives

Abstract: By JOSE MIGUEL OVIEDO Around 1970, in the prologue to his collection of essays Extraterritorial,1 George Steiner recognized that the language revolution that immediately preceded and followed World War I particularly in Central Europe had produced among certain contemporary writers a phenomenon which he called unhousedness, a term we could paraphrase as "linguistic uprooting. " Almost as if they had lost their sense of a center, these writers, to a greater or lesser degree, passed through various languages, making their relation to them a major theme of their works. Having fled the "maternal house" of their own language, they came to dwell precariously in an "international hotel" of languages containing many rooms, entrances, and exits. Steiner chose three authors Nabokov, Borges, and Beckett as models of this class of writer and pointed out that they were possibly "the three representative figures in the literature of exile which is, perhaps, the main impulse of current literature." Moreover, he dedicated the first three essays of the volume to them, and the title of the collection was inspired by none other than Nabokov himself. Steiner concluded his titular essay with this paragraph:

The Difficulty of Living in an Age of Cultural Decline and Spiritual Corruption: R. B. Kitaj 1965–1970

Abstract: Contemporary opinion consigns most of the art produced in the nineteen sixties to a critical limbo. While Pop is understood as a celebration of consumer culture, post painterly abstraction and Minimalism in particular are seen to represent pragmatic and corporate values expressive of dominant American ideologies. Kitaj's work fails to conform to these stereotypes. Significantly he blends an acute historical awareness with a contradictory technical achievement which parallels Post-Modernist pluralism while at the same time pursuing the emancipatory and utopian ideal inherent in Modernism. He carries out a quest for a lost universality which he is unable to resolve within the discourse of the European tradition. This is, perhaps beyond all else, a reflection of his own cultural insecurity. Indeed, it is not until the middle seventies and his discovery of Jewishness that he is finally able to find a resolution to his desire for some kind of authority that might satisfy the need for a redemptive narrative. But in Jewishness there is an exclusivity found in the diversity and plurality of the Post-Modern which shies away from the allembracing and grandiose projects of Modernity. Many of Kitaj's pictures from this period rely for their effect on the multiple discourses of Hollywood, book illustration, European history, criticism, literature and art history in a manner quite different, for example, from either Richard Hamilton's or Andy Warhol's own very individual investigations into contemporary mass media icons. Kitaj creates a bricolage of other discourses and integrates them within the privileged discourse of fine art, suggestive of an implicit awareness of what Frederic Jameson and others have termed the 'decentred subject' who is constructed wholly in the imaginary, without unmediated experience of the world.' In contrast to most Post-Modern cultural production, however, Kitaj makes no concession to the consumer nor does he emulate slick commercial surfaces, but maintains a rough patina more easily associated with High Modernist practice. In the collaboratively and mechanically produced screen prints Kitaj emphasises machine finish through attached photographs and printed 'hand made' marks.2 But none of this has the high gloss typical of so much of the work of such contemporaries as Allen Jones and Peter Phillips.3 Of the painting Trout for Factitious Bait (1965) (Fig. 1), clearly influenced by the abrupt, montage-style construction of the screen prints, Kitaj writes: A lot of old stories are malingering in Trout ... old formalist persuasion, old brief cases and houses, old colours and arrangements ... worn out conjunctions ... baiting a modernist legacy. It can't have much of a future that picture.4