The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Abstract: Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. With "Gardens", Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, "Gardens" is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, "Forests" and "The Dominion of the Dead". Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.

Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence

Abstract: With this pretentious title, I want to continue investigating a nexus of problems, both theoretical and philosophical, which I already touched upon several times – particularly in my Wellek Lectures at Irvine in 1996.1 The term “cruelty” is chosen by convention (but with some literary references in mind) to indicate those forms of extreme violence, either intentional or systemic, physical or moral – although such distinctions become questionable precisely when we cross the lines of extremity – that, so to speak, appear to us to be “worse than death.” It is my hypothesis, generally speaking, that the actual or virtual looming of cruelty represents for politics, and particularly for today’s politics in the framework of socalled globalization, a crucial experiment in which the very possibility of politics is at stake. For the speculative idea of a politics of politics, or a politics in the second degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible or is not made absolutely impossible, I borrow the term “civility” – which indeed has many other uses. It is certainly an ambiguous term, but I think that its connotations are preferable to those of, say, civilization, socialization, police and policing, politeness, etc. In particular, “civility” does not necessarily involve the idea of a suppression of “conflicts” and “antagonisms” in society, as if they were always the harbingers of violence and not the opposite. Much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss is the result of a blind political preference for “consensus” and “peace,” not to speak of the implementation of law and order policies on a global scale. This, among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of “topography,” by which I understand at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective – for instance taking into account such shifting distinctions as “North and South,” “center and periphery,” “this side of the border or across the border,” “global and local,” etc. – and an abstract, speculative perspective, meaning that the causes and effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and the same stage, but on different “scenes” or “stages,” which can be pictured as “real” and “virtual” or “imaginary” – but the imaginary and the virtual are probably no less material, no less determining than the real. This paper is based on a talk which I was asked to deliver in November 1999 for the opening of the Graduate Course in Humanitarian Action at the University of Geneva.2 This will explain why the issues of citizenship and segregation,

The Organization and the Symbolic: Organizational Dynamics Viewed from a Lacanian Perspective

Abstract: For many rationalist observers, organizational dysfunctions, such as recurrent failures in the implementation of strategic orientations, the constantly aggressive behaviour of managers, and so on, are nothing other than manifestation of deficiencies in decision-making or in the well thought-out application of decisions. In the light of psychoanalysis, however, such phenomena can be regarded differently, in particular as compulsions to repeat or actings-out. Indeed, in this perspective, it is on a ‘stage’ other than that of ‘reality’ that the game is played out: the stage of the imaginary and unconscious symbolic determinations. The object of this article is to propose a fresh reading of organizational life based on the work of Jacques Lacan. Although Lacanian notions are often seen as posing numerous problems for those brought up in an Anglo-American tradition of intellectual endeavour, this article upholds that such notions suggest rigorous alternative ways of approaching organizations.

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.