“Freudful Mistakes”: On Forgetting and On Forgetting Psychoanalysis

Today, we are called to forget psychoanalysis in order to escape the confines of the subject and language and so to embrace the “great outdoors” of materiality. In the face of this call to forget psychoanalysis and to forget that language matters, I return to psychoanalysis and language through Freud’s account of forgetting proper names. What Freud reveals in the moment of forgetting is the insistence of the drive as that which occurs in the absence of language and in the “material” of the body. In Lacan’s formulation, this is the eruption of “lalangue”, the eruption of a “language” that intersects with the drive. This is forgotten in the turn to materiality, which turns away from language and the drive. Sebastiano Timpanaro reduces the Freudian lapsus to the mere material play of language itself, while Catherine Malabou moves to a neurophysiological plasticity that resists inscription in meaning. The symmetry of these gestures lies in a common materialism that erases the relation to language. To complete the return to language and matter I conclude by re-examining Freud’s discussion of negation. In negation, the saying of “not”, we find a cancelling of language that reveals the insistence of the drive and the material in language

Zones of Trauma: On Deleuze and Control

In his discussion of the transition from the cinema of the movement-image to the cinema of the time-image, Deleuze famously makes way for the traumatic intrusion of history. This transition, he writes, is not purely internal to cinema, but the result of the emergence of '‘any spaces whatever’, deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction. And in these any-spaceswhatever a new race of characters was stirring, kind of mutant: they saw rather than acted, they were seers. (1989: xi) ' These spaces are the result of the destruction caused by the Second World War, creating new forms of anonymous or empty space: bombed cities, abandoned villages, the chaos of what Thomas Pynchon, in Gravity’s Rainbow, called “the zone” (1975: 281-616).1 It is these spaces, especially in Italian neo-realism, which will break up the movement-image and release “a little time in a pure state” (Deleuze 1989: xi). Due to the stark emptiness of these spaces and their anonymity, characters or images will no longer be embedded in movement but instead become detached into time

Happy Like Neurotics: Roland Barthes, Ben Lerner, and the Neurosis of Writing

Modernity was born under the sign of happiness in the claims to common happiness visible in the French and American Revolutions. This dimension of common happiness appears to have receded or been wrecked by the violent path of contemporary history. Here I attempt to rehabilitate the possibility of common happiness through the exploration of the work of Roland Barthes and of the contemporary poet and novelist Ben Lerner. In particular, we can reconstruct from their writing the possibility of neurosis as the means to access the problem of common happiness. While neurosis appears the classical and even banal sign of the blockage of happiness, the very minor status of neurosis can also indicate the contours of the possible experience of common happiness

Arguments within English Theory

The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, to ‘Brexit’, appears as a traumatic shock. Here this shock is examined in the context of the national imaginary of ‘Englishness’ and its relationship to theory. I focus on the theoretical tendency known as accelerationism, which suggests we embrace abstraction and modernity to transcend the limits of contemporary capitalism into a new post-capitalist society. Accelerationism embraces the future and modernity, in contrast with the seemingly backward-looking imaginaries of Brexit. The desire of accelerationism to transcend national limits, including these backward-looking imaginaries of Englishness, is actually shaped by these imaginaries. In this way, accelerationism and the debates around it offers ways to unlock the social, psychic and theoretical formations that condition Brexit as well. What they reveal is the way in which Brexit is shaped by a particularly ‘English’ form of modernisation

The Breakdown of Capitalist Realism

In this intervention, I reflect on Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism as a work better known for its title, as a phrase or slogan, than for the substance of the book. While indicative of the success of Fisher’s diagnosis, one borne out through the experience of capitalist crisis and austerity, I want to turn to the problem of the alternative and the future that was a constant concern of Fisher’s writing. In particular, probing the “realism” in “capitalist realism,” I want to consider Fisher’s interest in the breakdown of capitalist realism. This “breakdown” is indicated negatively by psychic suffering and collapse, but also positively by the cultural forms of the weird and eerie as markers of a consciousness beyond “capitalist realism,” the mapping of capitalist crisis, and the futures that might positively emerge through breakdown. At stake in the substance of Fisher’s work, I suggest, lies a class phenomenology concerned with not only grasping the suffering inflicted by capitalist culture, but also the possibilities of a breakdown of realism that would imagine a future oriented to a new collective experience beyond the existing limits of psychic and social formations

Separacija in reverzibilnost: Agamben o podobi

Giorgio Agamben’s thoughts on the image seem to occupy a minor role in his work, confined to occasional essays and remarks. In fact, I argue, his thoughts on the image offer the key to grasping the fundamental political and philosophical coordinates of Agamben’s work as a whole. The image is the site at which Agamben probes the dual operations of separation, by which the state and capital remove life into a neutral space of circulation and equivalency, and the contrary effect of reversibility, in which the separated image is redeemed for a new politics. This inscribes the image into a fundamentally ambivalent space – at once the site of “danger” and “saving”. Contrary to a pessimistic reading of Agamben’s work, I argue that his work on the deactivation of the image suggests possible strategies for a new politics that would return the political to common use.Zdi se, da mišljenje o podobi zavzema obrobno mesto znotraj dela Giorgia Agambena, omejeno na občasne eseje in pripombe. Toda pokazati želim, da njegovo mišljenje podobe dejansko nudi ključ za razumevanje temeljnih političnih in filozofskih koordinat Agambenovega dela kot celote. Podoba je prizorišče, na katerem Agamben preiskuje dvojni operaciji separacije, s katero država in kapital premestita življenje v nevtralni prostor cirkulacije in ekvivalence, in nasproten učinek reverzibilnosti, ki ločeno podobo znova pridobi za novo politiko. S tem je podoba vpisana v temeljno ambivalentnen prostor – je obenem prizorišče »nevarnosti« in »rešitve«. Zoper pesimistično branje Agambenovega dela trdim, da njegovo pisanje o dezaktivaciji podobe predlaga možne strategije za novo politiko, ki bi vrnila politično v skupno rabo

The Peculiarities of English Culture

Abstract Francis Mulhern’s Figures of Catastrophe argues for the existence of a hitherto-unnoticed generic form: the condition of culture novel, which offers a metacultural reflection on the conditions for the existence of culture and for access to culture. Mulhern’s analysis is located within the framework of Marxist reflections on culture, the history of British cultural Marxism, and Mulhern’s own project of the critique and analysis of ‘metaculture’ in Britain. In particular, this review focuses on Mulhern’s contention that the ‘condition of culture novel’ offers a catastrophic or even nihilistic vision of the access to culture by the working class. Mulhern’s argument is that the ‘condition of culture’ novel accompanies the emergence, solidification and collapse of the British culture of ‘labourism’. This review explores the consequences of this argument for the assessment of ‘culture’ and the future of the novel as a site of reflection on the condition of culture.</jats:p