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The visual devices employed by the artists Anton Kannemeyer and Brett Murray to criticise apartheid-era patriarchal rule seemed to have remained intact in their satirical critiques of black male leadership, yet their later works generate markedly different affects. This difference in affect is explored through the application of key Lacanian concepts (primarily the RSI and jouissance). It is argued that a slippage in the operation of the signifier demonstrates the tensions, complexities and anxieties that underpin white male subjectivities in times of radical transition. It is proposed that the artists’ jouissance, an irrepressible and destructive kind of enjoyment fuelled by the feeling that one’s rightful enjoyment is not only denied but has indeed been stolen by a cultural other, is behind the production of these works and is responsible for its affects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I approach the eco-maternal from two angles: first by exploring the ecological aspects of my own mother's subjectivity, primarily her passionate love of nature and how it has shaped my own desires and trajectories; and second by exploring the trans-subjectivity of our collective mother, Mother Earth. I begin with a story about a trip I took to Alaska and the enigmatic messages that led me there. I also tell a story of encounters with the sublime, and of disintegration and transformation through jouissance. Along the way, I weave in theories on desire from Lacan, Laplanche, and Bracha Ettinger in an effort to conceptualize eco-maternal subjectivity, and to consider how adopting an eco-maternal mindset might lead to positive outcomes for humanity and the planet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Old Kingdom's River of Death is a hell impinging on life: The Dead take hideous Boschian forms, and helped by necromancers wielding "Free Magic" they often emerge from Death. Necromancers, Free Magic, and the Dead are battled by Abhorsens wielding "Charter magic," Free Magic that has been transformed by symbols. Immersion in the Charter gives a joyous experience of connection to all life. Symbolization must unite with Free Magic to create this experience; symbolization alone is inadequate, as we see in the example of mundanely rational people who dwell in a neighboring land. But the source of joyous access to the Charter is also the source of access to Death, demonstrating jouissance that can provide great pleasure or great horror. Integrating symbolic with nonverbal experience is fundamental to humanness, becoming crucial when language develops around year three. The theme of dead mothers indicates how this development can leave gaps that horror creeps through. Some mothers of Abhorsens and necromancers are literally dead; other mothers are emotionally dead. Desire for joyous connection turns hellish under the sway of the dead mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hooshang Golshiri’s “My little Chapel” relates the story of a character who finds himself in possession of a toe-like protrusion from the beginning of his life, an abnormality which brings him into a never-ending conflict with his surroundings. The obsessional attachment of the narrator with his sixth-toe, however, poses significant questions regarding the nature of his symptomatic dependence on this apparently useless piece of flesh. Through a psychoanalytical reading of the story, the present article is an attempt to shed light on the psychological intricacies of this problematic relation. Drawing on the teachings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek, it argues that the only solution to this enigma is to consider the toe as a materialization of the pure nothingness and lack which, from a psychoanalytical point of view, marks the very core of the subject in the symbolic universe and becomes the only venue for the safe flowing of jouissance. Through its inert presence, the toe embodies the Lacanian objet a as the most precious, albeit illusory, thing in the psychic life of the human beings, the removal, or the disclosure, of which could lead to irreparable consequences.

This article compares representations of soccer fanship in two Argentine films. It makes the claim that the representation of football fanship can be read as desire or jouissance depending on their historical and political context of production. Following Slavoj Žižek's concept of ideological fantasy, the article claims that these two films stage the relationship between the symbolic and imaginary registers as they operate to construct the reality that masks the real of the fans' desire in their given historical and political contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consciousness raising seems to be the most pressing task facing any project for environmental sustainability today. A psychoanalytic interpretation of the climate crisis, however, reveals that a far more urgent challenge is recognizing that we might be deriving jouissance, or unconscious enjoyment, from the very worsening of the crisis. This article contends that videogames are the ideal medium through which to grasp the form that our unconscious enjoyment takes—and, if mobilized against self-destructive capitalism, the emancipatory form our enjoyment could take—in the Anthropocene. Drawing on an analysis of the videogame Donut County, it makes two psychoanalytic interventions in ecocritical theory. The first is that any theory of the climate crisis must account for the subject of the unconscious—not as a nature-dominating individual, but as a hole in material reality. The second is that any project for environmental sustainability must avow the subject's death-driven enjoyment rather than repress or avoid it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Depuis I’époque de Freud, l’anorexie mentale est une énigme pour la clinique psychanalytique. Cet article vise à montrer le lien entre anorexie et addiction, en soulignant le style de jouissance addictive comme typique de la société consumériste. Le symptôme anorexique se présent donc comme solution subjective au malaise dans la civilisation contemporaine. A travers deux cas cliniques, les implications diagnostiques seront aussi montrées, en relevant de la position singulière sujetpar rapport à l’Autre et à la jouissance.

With reference to the fantasy and its traversal, this article examines the relation between desire and jouissance in the analytic experience, where the object a "can only be deduced to the extent of each individual's psychoanalysis". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from confining himself to the phenomenological description of cases in order to give an account of the clinic, Lacan turned to topological writing. This text reviews some of the stages in Lacan's work in progress, in particular the transition from the topology of the graph of desire to that of the Borromean knot. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article examines contemporary scholarship attempting a theoretical convergence between Lacanian psychoanalysis and Nietzschean philosophy. The main positions, ideas and arguments of this scholarship are assessed. In doing so, the philosophical problem that immediately arises concerns the very possibility of such a theoretical dialogue. The thesis to be developed, then, is that superficial similarities rather obscure core theoretical, and even ontological, disagreements – and so besides the critical examination of the mentioned literature, the goal of the paper is to illuminate these tensions insofar they obstruct easy Nietzsche-Lacan articulations. Thus following the resemblances between both theoretical perspectives, we move from the merely superficial to the stronger similarities among the will to power, unconscious desire and jouissance, then between nihilism and jouissance, and finally between the very logics of resentment and repression. At each step, the article shows similarities to rather be insufficient, to the extent they are sustained on unquestioned assumptions. The paradigmatic one: the idea that Nietzsche is already a Lacanian avant la lettre.

Le texte propose une analyse de l'acte de manger chez Emmanuel Levinas. Plus spécifiquement, nous nous concentrons sur le manger et le travail. Le manger et le travail sont deux types d’appropriation possibles du monde par l’ipséité. Notre but est de décrire les deux types d’appropriation du monde chez Emmanuel Levinas et de les comparer. On en tirera des possibles conséquences pour une pensée écologique dans la conclusion parce que le manger éfface les frontières entre l'humain et le non-humain. Il s'agit d'un essai écologique de déconstruire le rapport entre l’humain et le monde, qui se montre dans l’acte de manger.

The purpose of this manuscript is to demonstrate that the mystic experience configures a particular subjective solution that opens up the possibility to the singularization and disalienation of the subject in the context of the relationship with the institutional Other; therefore, it incise ethical-politically on the context of the social bond. Therefore, a theoretical research with a psychoanalytical framework will be carried out. Thus, the theme of uniqueness will be discussed in the light of the notion of female jouissance in interface with mystique (Lacan, 1972-1973/1985). In addition, this appanage will be interspersed with the Foucaultian concept of self-care (Foucault, 1981-82/2006), and from this, will be scrutinized possible convergences between the mystical experience and the ethical-political and aesthetic exercise related to the self-care. Based on this intersection, we will seek to support the premise that the mystic, more precisely, the jouissance of God, implied in the jouissance of the woman which is governed by the logic of the not-all, allows the subject to singularize himself, therefore, to adopt a critical posture that converges to the liberation of the Other's discourse and to the transformation of oneself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Žižek supposes that traumas can turn into death-drives and offer the subject surplus jouissance. He warns that ideological systems can profit from traumas to further subjugate their citizens. Notwithstanding, Badiou construes that traumas can appear as tremendous moments of Truth/Events that betrays the voids of the Symbolic Order and actualizes the universal truths that postmodernism has constantly denied or endeavored to suppress. In so thinking, Badiou hypothesizes that the Truth/Event will find/invent its own faithful subject that cooperate to actualize the suppressed or denied Real of their age. Badiou criticizes the Western Ethics for devising a secured mode of life that emasculates the subject of post capitalism age and deprives him of experiencing the sufferings that can confront him with the Real. Badiou states that the Western ethics deliberately ignores the positive effects of PTSD recoveries that can reveal a lot regarding the psychological and social weakness of the subject and the society as well. Defending the idea of traversing the fantasies and encountering the Real, Žižek, however, does not become convinced of the emancipatory force that Badiou attributes to traumatic Events. Instead, he announces that the subject's fidelity to the Badiouian Truth/Event approximates to the devoted insurgents' allegiance to the 'mythic violence' that enables them to disclaim responsibility for their deeds. Badiou himself is apprehensive of ever-present 'simulacra' that the sovereign ideology concocts to counterfeit the Truth/Event. What Žižek prescribes is an 'Act' that can be embodied in 'divine violence' that divulges the Symbolic Order's void. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While considerations of gender predominate in scholarly accounts of why and how people derive pleasure from videogame play, the question of sex remains either undertheorized or conspicuously absent from the conversation. Drawing on Jacques Lacan's formulae of sexuation, this article argues that the jouissance (enjoyment) of videogame play is sexed rather than gendered. It theorizes two logics of enjoyment in videogame play: enjoyment with exception and enjoyment without exception. Through an analysis of the videogame Inside, it argues that the logic of enjoying without exception undergirds the libidinal satisfaction of all videogame play. To accept that the enjoyment of videogame play is predicated on such a logic, however, means to accept the ontological failure of the sexual relation. Videogame culture is subsequently founded on a disavowal of the logic of enjoying without exception and a pathological identification with the logic of enjoying with exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital algorithm has allowed the management of data from web users by informational conglomerates. In a discreet and personalized way, the new form of governmentality collects, organizes, exchanges and returns data to the individual in the form of more information. More and more, it comes up against the singular dimension, touching the field of jouissance via the proliferation of objects a which, in the Lacanian theory of discourses, assumes the double function of loss and an incessant attempt to supplement jouissance. With the increase in information, the object reaches the social apex and the digital reaches a discursive level. Inserting itself in the same niche of know [savoir], digital information takes advantage of the subjective division, leaving little space for the subject to deal with the entropy of his jouissance via desire. If negentropy is the attribute of savoir that limits the dispersion of jouissance, in the information processed and returned algorithmically this process is accelerated, acting directly on the economy of affections. To the detriment of the subject, what remains is an experience of jouissance that is increasingly direct, raw, less mediated by savoir and the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Introduction: The present paper proposes that Lisa Unger's Fragile (2010) is involved in a late capitalis t social phenomenon that announces both the extinction of the authoritative Oedipal Father and the liberation of mOther and son from his reign. The Hollowers in the novel are incapable of experiencing any real sexual relationship the lack of which heavily influences their personal and social life. The present paper reveals that even the Hollowers' commitment of rape, inces t, and even murder cannot compensate for the enjoyment of the proper sexual relationship they are innately deprived of. In Fragile, both man and woman infer an ancient rivalry over jouissance from their sexual relationship. Accordingly, Unger's characters orches trate various psychological schemes for optimum pleasure from their sexual relationship, while they become involved with some irreparable psychological disorders that neither supply them with their desired pleasure from sex, nor release them from the sexual traumas that permanently remain with them. Background of S tudy: Between Žižek and Badiou, there is no contention that the contemporary man cannot live up to the name and authority associated with the Oedipal Father, and epitomize the Big Phallus of the Symbolic Order. However, while Žižek reduces woman to an object of exchange between father and son (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms! 75), Badiou does not consider her as a passive object-cause-of-desire; quite contrary, to Badiou, woman can freely serve and express her social and sexual identity and challenge man's long-held symbolic superiority (Badiou, True Life 82). The sexuation theory extensively covers the sexual relationship between man and woman and discusses that proper and meaningful sexual relationship is impossible due to the fact both man and woman view it as a place to demand their jouissance. Methodology: Sexual relationship in proper sense, as the sexuation theory implies, is impossible, for man uses it to dominate woman whereas he is basically under delusions of authority (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms! 156). The sexuation theory publicizes the decline of the Oedipal Father and the latecapitalis t phenomenon of orphan bodies that the anal father of jouissance adopts in order to promote frenzied consumerism and monopolized jouissance (Felicia Cosey 6). However, the Oedipal Father's collapse is followed by the subject's metamorphosis into the 'sacrificed body' that is perplexed with inexplicable che vuoi ques tions regarding his symbolic value. The Oedipal Father now morbidly envies his son's firm ties with his wife through what Badiou coins as 'infantilization' (Tutt 10). Žižek's underrating insight to woman as merely "one of the Names of the Father" (Žižek, Enjoy Symptoms 169) is weighed agains t Badiou's view of woman as a free agent of herself. This paper finds pertinent the sexuation theory with the psychological disorders of 'neurosis', 'psychosis', and 'perversion', and illus trates the subject's crushing oscillation between the pleasure of sexual intimacy and the preservation of consciousness and symbolic integrity. Conclusion: The sexual relationship in Lisa Unger's Fragile is a devas tating experience rather than a pleasurable one; indeed, the more they try to enjoy their sexual relationship, the more dismayed they become. Fragile, in line with Žižek's psychoanalytic hypotheses, demons trated that authentic sexual relationship is profoundly influenced by the subject's process of phallic cas tration that permanently takes him away from the Imaginary Order and the Real encompassed in; therefore, both man and woman presume the sexual relationship as a way to retrieve the los t Real. This article illus trated that in the pos t-capitalism era, the res trictive Freudian Oedipal Father cannot survive and exert his influence on his household; ins tead, as the novel of Fragile indicates, the contemporary father is eclipsed by his wife and son's s trong emotional ties that have shaped after he los this symbolic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present reflection aims to combine the theoretical references of sociology and psychoanalysis around the human action theme. Taking as a reference some case studies presented, it was inquired about the work ethics and the admission of certain subjects to this lifestyle. It resumed the contributions of sociology as a science of culture in the understanding of the action; in particular, it discussed Max Weber's theoretical distillations on the Protestant Reformation and the building of a new social morality in which work takes a central position in the lives of subjects. The debate was concluded by presenting the limits of sociological explanation and the advances that psychoanalysis can present to the debate; in particular, the reflections on impulse, motivation, and enjoyment are resumed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article asks „What is gay sexuality?“ and attempts an answer by starting from literary formulations of gay sexuality. It identifies two central traits in literary formulations: literary texts formulate gay sexuality in proximity to death and in figures of transgression. This constellation is interpreted by reference to the history of modern homosexuality and to the psychoanalytic concept of jouissance. The article’s answer to the question is: Gay sexuality is that sexuality in which jouissance is articulated. In conclusion, the article discusses the political consequences of this answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theme of the nightmare is not a very easy one to approach. Quite obviously, we are dealing with something highly unpleasant, but what contributes to the challenge is also the aspect of experience - the experience of the nightmare, and this is implies something that is lived. Thinking about experience, trying to get some knowledge out of it - some kind of knowledge about the worst - is already a means of distancing oneself from it. I suppose one of the ways in which we could define the distress proper to the nightmare is precisely that one cannot get out of it. And it is also what makes the vital need of a separation so urgent, the need expressed in awakening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives an account of the work program within the framework of the Postdoctoral project to be developed around the question of the specificity of lubricity murder and its possible reading from the field of Psychoanalysis. In this sense, it delimits the variables that allow sifting the object of study, delineating the approach in the following terms: structural and economic perspective of the murder by lubricity. The present text briefly reviews the background of the subject and the question and objectives that allow the construction of the object of the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manuscript proposes a form of violence characterized as "cold" -which is the opposite to a form of warm violence-, which manifests how parents in the process of getting a divorce, place their hatred towards their children. One way of doing so is by displaying what we call an alienating will, in which the children get involved in the parent's discord and confrontations, as well as their attempts of punishment and revenge between them. The phenomenology of the syndrome of parental alienation allows us to go deeper into these sorts of dynamics, in which children get involved in the violence displayed from one parental figure to the other. The alienating will go beyond the syndrome by inserting the oedipal lovehatred vicissitudes to the structure. The Medea complex exemplifies radically the fateful destiny of this alienating will in which the children are reduced to objects. This will relate to the concept of jouissance, which Lacan subscribes into an ethics that supports violent acts against subjectivity and even lives. Finally, a group testimony allows us to gather a posture of resistance against this will and its cold violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article challenges David Rudd's recent criticism of 'The Reading Critics' school of children's literature criticism, which he takes to be problematic in so far as it is intolerant towards traditions that stray outside its own narrow concerns. Rudd forwards in its place an approach that is generous and dynamic. Through a close reading of Rudd's analysis of both Winnie-the Pooh and psychoanalysis, this article understands the politics and poetics of tolerance to open some difficult questions. What are the limits of tolerance? Is what Rudd forwards merely a tolerance of the tolerable? Is his forgiving attitude to the work of 'The Reading Critics', as he mourns their passing, tolerance also? What if these critics were to object to such tolerance, or read violence or erasure within it? Most significantly, this article is interested in how such tolerance, and the celebration of open community, fits within the 'broadly Lacanian framework' that Rudd elsewhere champions. As Lacan has, at best, an ambivalent attitude to the politics of neighborliness, this article argues that the defense of a 'broad' and tolerant approach to theory that calls upon his work is only made possible by arguments that neglect the specifics of Lacan's writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay unfolds in four parts. In the first part I argue that the struggle against apartheid must be understood as a war against war, namely a war that is waged with the superego of apartheid as war itself. In the second part, I consider J.M. Coetzee's essay on The Mind of Apartheid in the context of the hypothesis put forth by Jacques-Alain Miller and others that racism is the theft of enjoyment. I show that the superego of apartheid is both a threatening and a threatened object and that working to produce the impression that the object of enjoyment is under constant threat is an essential component of the superego's sadism. In part three I stay with Coetzee's essay to consider the spatialisation of the superego under apartheid. I argue that this spatialisation should be understood in terms of Carl Schmitt's concept of the nomos. Finally, in part four I reconsider earlier work on apartheid as enforced melancholia to argue for a burial of the apartheid superego that can release the subject of the postapartheid from enforced psychosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The psychoanalytic clinic – that is to say its ethics oriented from the real – is distinguished by its politics: it consists in raising the fundamental dissidence of the symptom to the height of a value of ex-sistence which allows the link to the other even so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1958, Lacan responds to the objection made about psychoanalysis not being scientific by giving a scientific status to the subject of the analytic experience… We will see how he builds on the clinic with the Witz for his demonstration and the practical consequences that can be deduced from it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]