Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1991"

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Abstract: Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-twentieth century race, religion and politics. Elsewhere he trains his eye on literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on love to the politics of George Orwell's 'Inside the Whale', providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carre, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon among others. Profound, passionate and insightful, Imaginary Homelands is a masterful collection from one of the greatest writers working today.

Looking awry : an introduction to Jacques Lacan through popular culture

Abstract: Slavoj ?i?ek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. ?i?ek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's "Vertigo "to Stephen King's "Pet Sematary, "from McCullough's "An Indecent Obsession "to Romero's "Return of the Living Dead--a "strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan.?i?ek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories--the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small "a, "the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject--at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of ?i?ek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is "not "saying, ?i?ek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.

Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud

Abstract: Bibliographic abbreviations. Preface. Acknowledgments. 1 The Enigma of the 'Death Drive' 2 Lacanian Reflections on Narcissism 3 The Energetics of the Imaginary 4 Rereading Beyond the Pleasure Principle 5 The Unconscious Structured Like a Language 6 The Formations of the Unconscious 7 Metapsychology in the Perspective of Metaphysics 8 Conclusion. Notes. Bibliography. Index.

Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis

Abstract: Translator's introduction Prefatory note 1. Introduction 2. Mistaken identity: Lacan's theory of the 'Mirror Stage' 3. The unconscious chess player 4. The rise and fall of the signifier 5. Significant fallout: metonymy and metaphor 6. Spades and hearts: the subject as stylus 7. The subject as 'Fader': the imaginary and the symbolic 8. 'When someone speaks, it gets light': demand 9. The signification of the Phallus Appendix.

Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory

Abstract: This book offers a detailed account of Spinozaa s influence on various schools of present--day critical thought. That influence extends from Althusserian Marxism to hermeneutics, deconstruction, narrative poetics, new historicism, and the unclassifiable writings of a thinker like Giles Deleuze. The author combines a close exegesis of Spinozaa s texts with a series of chapters that trace the evolution of literary theory from its period of high scientific rigour in the mid--1960s to its latest "postmodern", neopragmatist or anti--theoretical phase. He examines the thought of Althusser, Macherey and Deleuze as well as others (including the new historicists) who have registered the impact of his pioneering work without any overt acknowledgement. On the one hand, theorists like Althusser and Macherey could celebrate Spinoza as the first philosopher before Marx to understand the need for a riorous distinction between science (or "theoretical practice") and ideology (or the realm of lived experience subject to various forms of imaginary error of misrecognition). On the other, Deleuze makes Spinoza the hero of his crusade against theories of whatever kind -- Kantian, Marxist, Freudian, post structuralist -- which always end up by imposing some abstract order of concepts and categories on the libidinal flux of "desiring production", or the "body--without--organs" of anarchic instinctual drives.

Race, discourse, and power in France

Abstract: Race and discourse the "seiul de tolerance" - the uses of a "scientific" racist concept mechanisms of oppression "les chargeurs sont dans la rue!" - racism and trade unions in Lyons race, discourse and power in institutional housing - the case of immigrant worker hostels in Lyons race, nation and class the Front National in Provence-Alpes-Cotes d'Azure - a case of institutionalized racism? North African immigration and the French political imaginary writing for others - authorship and authority in immigrant literature "Un discours de muettes?" - problems of "la prise de parole" in the fiction of Assia Djebar

The Signifier and the Group

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the idea of the group as a signifying chain. Group elements, e.g., roles, subgroups, group episodes, and social acts, are viewed as signifiers open to particular significations each of which may be represented within the imaginary history of the group, i.e., in particular people and events. This theoretical position is arrived at via an application of Lacan's ideas to implications drawn from an examination of Freud's works on narcissism and group psychology. To Freud, the group is bound together by narcissistic identifications among the members who have each incorporated important aspects of the leader into his/her ego-ideal. The myth of the primal horde exemplifies this basic group structure. Taking this myth as a basis for further hypotheses about groups, this paper argues for differential member identifications with the leader. These differential identifications seem to be the imaginary effects of the signifying chain (group structure) that is anchored by the central signif...

The poetics of impurity : Louis MacNeice, writing and the thirties

Abstract: This thesis argues that the notion of 'impurity' may be taken as a model for paradigms in MacNeice's texts which are subjected to undercutting and transgression, by virtue of their presumed identity, their context, and by the workings of the text. This impurity challenges notions of MacNeice as an exponent of 'common-sense' empiricism. Chapter One examines notions of purity and impurity as promoted by MacNeice in the thirties. MacNeice's exposition in Modern Poetry is shown to be contradictory. Comparison with the figure of Orwell indicates that Modern Poetry, and its promotion of common-sense 'experience' or 'life', is an unreliable guide to MacNeice's thirties work. Chapter Two examines notions of 'History' in the thirties, and of MacNeice's treatment of time in a number of poems. MacNeice's poems demonstrate a conception of time-as-difference, which is shown to be historically constructed within 'static' or 'imaginary' frames of reference. These frames of reference are seen to be imperiled by historical circumstances Chapter Three analyses MacNeice's presentation of representation in, and of, society in the thirties. Attention is paid to poems dealing with problems of representation and of observation within a given social context, particularly that of consumer culture. Chapter Four examines MacNeice's examination of the subject or 'I' of the thirties. I argue that MacNeice evidences a scepticism towards the claims of the thinking, acting, subject, inhabited as it is by the dominance of text or 'writing' within history, and the indeterminacies this engenders. Chapter Five offers a reading of Autumn Journal which emphasises MacNeice's attention to the processes of the construction of 'unreliable' fictions. Rather than asserting the values of liberal humanism in the poem, it is seen to question the implications of such an act itself. The poem is shown to question the notion of the possibility of the 'honesty' of the subject which is often attributed to MacNeice. Chapter Six argues for the necessity of further re-examination of 'Louis MacNeice, writing and the thirties' and the wider implications of 'impurity'.

The imaginary life: Landscape and culture in Australia

Abstract: (1991). The imaginary life: Landscape and culture in Australia. Journal of Australian Studies: Vol. 15, No. 29, pp. 12-27.

The Face Before the Mirror-Stage

Abstract: Drawing on the work of Irigaray and Levinas, this paper discusses the ethical limitations of Lacan's "mirror-stage" dynamic and interpolates a different interpretation of the material he uses to elaborate his theory. Close attention is paid to the significance of metaphors of vision and touch in the work of the three philosophers. The paper develops into an analysis of Irigaray's and Levinas's interpretations of touch as the differential site of ethics. In his account of the "mirror-stage," Jacques Lacan (1977) addressed a psychoanalytic problem which had long perplexed Freud: how could the emergence of a separate ego be accounted for in the transition from autoeroticism to object-love? Lacan's solution, which was to provide an account of the ego as a corporeally based fantasy, has provided feminist theorists of sexual difference with a sometimes useful, sometimes limiting formulation for the analysis of the sexual specificity of subjectivity.1 A significant feature of the mirror-stage model which I would like to pursue in this paper is that the first ego that the human infant recognizes-or rather, misrecognizes-and forms an erotic relationship with is itself in an alienated form. It is only coincidentally, in Lacan's account, that the (m)other becomes implicated in this ego formation, as the object which the infant confuses with its imaginary self. In this paper, the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Luce Irigaray will be used to examine the ethical limits of Lacan's account of subjectivity. Levinas is an idiosyncratic philosopher in the history of Western philosophy, not only because of his reversal of the traditional subordination of the ethical to the ontological, but also because, in a tradition which relentlessly privileges the specular, his theory of ethical subjectivity is theorized within the metaphor of touch. Luce Irigaray has engaged both Lacan and Levinas on the ethics of sexual difference in their theories of subjectivity. Among other approaches, her interpolation of a speculum as a sexually specific form of mirror is a significant intervention into what she diagnoses as Lacan's determined perpetuation of isomorphic subjectivity. This intervention will be only alluded

Jamaican Sayings: With Notes on Folklore, Aesthetics, and Social Control

Abstract: In 1992, Jamaicans celebrate the 30 anniversary of Jamaica's formal independance from Britain. This collection of Creole sayings contributes to the interest in cultural preservation which exists in anticipation of the event. The sayings aim to trigger reflection and thought. They are never fully explained, and, says the author, "in the most extreme situation one might well need an entire week to ponder and think seriously" about their meaning. They exert pressure to conform to community standards, and they influence conduct in much the same way as religion does. The maxims draw upon a variety of flora, fauna, and real or imaginary creatures. The anansi, for example, famous for "playin' fool fe ketch wise" (playing foolish in order to catch the wise), is regarded as a favourite hero in folklore. Creole, initially constructed as a coded language, employs a number of West African linguistic traditions. These Creole sayings, an addition to the literature and ethnography of the Caribbean region, link Jamaican culture to its African past. They should be of interest to Latin American scholars, to students of comparative sociology and anthropology, and to the general public.

Theory's Imaginal Other: American Encounters with South Korea and Japan

Abstract: Negotiating the postmodern terrain of the 1990s, it may now be the case that "Korea," like "Japan," must be warily inflected in quotation marks. Haunted by the American political imaginary, that is to say, "Korea" gets produced and projected as a cultural sign and occidental distortion from within some redemptive master narrative of global modernization. Or, worse yet, as Edward Said contends in a critique of the most textually selfscrupulous or "postparadigm" anthropology, this conflicted nation-state can be articulated only from within unequal structurations of capital/symbolic

Stories of an imaginary childhood

Abstract: In Stories of an Imaginary Childhood Melvin Jules Bukiet inscribes the world that might have been his own if not for the catastrophe that destroyed most of Jewish life in eastern Europe during the 1940s. Set before the Holocaust in the tiny Polish shtetl of Proszowice, each interconnected story follows the young protagonist through the pleasures and humiliations of childhood and the rites of manhood, as he fights against historical, social, and psychological forces that threaten to pull him down. "Bukiet proves that he is an expert at the [short story] form. His stories lift and soar, encompassing a world of truth in just a few pages. His characters have flesh and life. . . . Bukiet s topics are varied and universal: first love, growing up, trying to get along with people who are different. Each of these is approached with great humor and a deep respect for life experience." Daniel Neman, Richmond News Leader "Jewish-American fiction of a new order, one able to bring the best that has been thought and said about voice and literary texture to the service of a world with richer meaning and a deeper resonance." Sanford Pinsker, Midstream "Bukiet is enchanting, original, and thoroughly irresistible in any disguise. Stories of an Imaginary Childhood is an extraordinary achievement, an immensely enjoyable collection of truly remarkable tales." Susan Miron, Miami Herald"

'Unfinished Genesis': The Four Banks of the River Space

Abstract: 'I am a king of oceans and skies,' said Proteus to Rose. 'I swam, flew the Atlantic through Middle Passage Africa, India, Greece, Rome, multiple Christian/ pagan motherhood of carnival. I reached the margins of the world, I came to El Dorado, all in jest. What a golden jest colonialism and post-colonialism are. What untold riches! He knows as he dreams in his cradle. What a gift for a newborn child. Let us give him the riches of the Imagination for we have nothing. We are poor. Give him a chance, Rose. Let him live to create his Imaginary City of God.'3 In this plea for the survival of the two-year-old Anselm, Proteus, a Ulyssean figure, reiterates Harris's representation of the child as the carrier of hope for a regenerated imagination. He also clearly presents the deprived post-colonial world as a major locale and source of creativity to counter the crisis of civilization which ruling powers have been unable to solve through 'the long Day of the twentieth century', the time-span through which Anselm, the 'living dreamer' in The Four Banks of the River of Space, retraces his steps in order to conceive a better future. Though from his very first novel Harris has emphasized the need for the 'civilized' world

Indivisible selves & moral practice

Abstract: Persons and personal identity consciousness and its importance scepticism and practical life gambling in the dark and reflective equilibrium split brains multiplie personality non-reductionism and the use of imaginary examples egoistical concern without an ego persons, justice and dessert.

From Imaginary Drama to Dramatized Imagery: the Mappe-Monde Nouvelle Papistique, 1566-67

Abstract: HE WORLD according to M. Escorche-Messes, which the German satirist Johann Fischart commended to the Apostle Paul, had been displayed in Geneva in 1566, in what was probably the largest satirical image published in the sixteenth century. The MAPPE-MONDE NOUVELLE PAPISTIQUE (Pls 51; 5259), printed from sixteen blocks (surrounded by twelve additional sections of text), is a satirical Protestant depiction in numerous self-contained scenes of various parts and practices of the Catholic world. It was accompanied by a book, published independently, titled HISTOIRE DE LA MAPPE-MONDE PAPISTIQUE, EN LAQUELLE EST DECLAIRE TOUT ce qui est contenu et pourtraict en la grande Table, ou Carte de la Mappe-Monde: Composee par M. Frangidelphe Escorche-Messes, Imprimee en la ville de Luce Nouvelle [Geneva], Par Brifaud Chasse-diables. The book appeared in two editions, in 1566 and 1567.2 Up to a point, the Mappe-Monde seems to deploy contemporary cartographic knowledge and cosmographic conventions. These include the concentric depiction of the world, water surrounding the land, distribution of the land in one continuous strip in the upper half of the map and divided by water in the lower half, and the fire-spitting devil heads around it. The contours of land and water are to some extent based on actual geographical maps. Thus the 'mer du Jeusne' (Pls 57a, 58a)

Dora, Doralina: The Sexual Configuration of Discourse

Abstract: transforms the traditional Freudian Triad, with its axes constituted by the figures of mother father-daughter, into the Lacanian Triad of the narrative discourse with axes constituted by historical, symbolic and imaginative levels of the narrative. This transformation is achieved through the use of three basic structuring principles used in psychoanalysis which, in the Lacanian interpretration, may also be applied to the narrative discourse. These principles are aphanisis, antonomasis and mirror reflection. Each of these principles provides an outline for the borders between narrative levels. By abolishing the historical level the process of aphanisis allows this level to be recreated on the symbolic level; by effecting name substitution through metonymy and metaphor antonomasis releases the symbolic level into the imaginary; and the mirror reflection which operates on the imaginary level brings it back into contact with the historical level, which it reflects, not without accentuating, however, the arbitrariness of this reflection.

Imaginária França Antártica

Abstract: The article analyzes the narratives written by the Franciscan Andre Thevet and the Calvinist Jean de Lery about their stays in Antartic France, then recently created. Finding themselves before a world that was new in all aspects, these two French sojourners set out to describe the undescribable, and this led them to compose paradoxical texts where in the Renaisssance zeal for objective knowledge fostered interpretations from within the realm of the imaginary. The tensions between wonderment at (estranhamento), and appropriation and comprehension of, the other prompted a style of writing that can be interpreted as the beginning of anthropological discourse

Review-essay of N. A. Vasil'ev, Imaginary logic (Russian), edited by V. A. Smirnov

Abstract: This review analyzes the logical work of the Russian philosopher N. A. Vasil'ev on the occasion of the publication of an anthology (edited by Prof. V. A. Smirnov) of the logical writings of Vasil'ev and his commentators. The reviewer underscores the eclectic and multitudinous aspects of the logical thought of the logician-philosopher from Kazan'. His thought is deemed to be the most significant trait d'union between aristotelian syllogistics and the development of the new non-classical logics. In this essay, the reviewer therefore reconstructs, on the one hand, the relationship between Vasil'ev and the German psychologist tradition of the second half of the nineteenth century (especially Sigwart) and, on the other hand, the links with the research carried out by Lukasiewicz. She then examines the contents of the "imaginary logic" of Vasil'ev (1910-1913) and in particular the rejection of the principles of non-contradiction and of excluded middle, as well as the relationship of Vasil'ev's "imaginary logic" with the "imaginary geometry" of Lobachevskij. The reviewer does not accept the role of precursor to certain nonclassical logics (in particular paraconsistent and many-valued logics) which some scholars (A. Arruda, G. Kline, Smirnov himself, and others) have chosen to attribute to Vasil'ev's work. On the contrary, she maintains that the importance of the logical work of Vasil'ev should be evaluated from the historical point of view, according to which Vasil'ev's work is understood to be within the "transitional" philosophical thought of the end of the nineteenth century and to mark the origin of the non-classical logics of this century.

The Phallic Mother: Platonic Metaphysics of Lacan’s Imaginary

Abstract: Jacques Lacan has been a major force in the post-modernist attempt to dismantle the metaphysical foundation of Western thought. Working within the lineage of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger who have also attacked Platonic idealism, Lacan, like his contemporary, Jacques Derrida, locates the basis of metaphysical thought in the concept of presence articulated in Plato’s definition of Being. In Marges de la philosophie, Derrida has shown how, according to Plato, Truth is capable of adequate reflection in the eternal presence of the Sun, the origin of knowledge expressed through the origin of vision. Yet, as Derrida goes on to demonstrate, the Sun, as a metaphoric expression, represses the truth about Truth, the fact that, as Nietzsche had understood, Truth is inexpressible, non-representable.2 Lacan shares with Derrida this notion that it is metaphor itself which effects repression.