Hauntology or the return of the real man: edging the Žižek-Laclau controversy on populism

Looking at today’s academization of everyday life – academic knowledge having become central in mediating the presence of the human being with himself, the others and the world – it seems that academia has become the home-base of post-modern man. Academia is however no viable habitat, the (post)modern subject is pushed to the search to rejoin real life and be a real human being. In this paper it is argued that this is centrally related to the topic of ideology. The dispute between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek on populism is re-read in this light as it ultimately boils down to a dispute on what real man is. Laclau’s theory, missing the dimension of the uncanny and the truth shall thus be contrasted with Žižek’s recourse to the idea of hauntology as the latter is the basis for Žižek’s reasserting of what we could call the rock of class struggle. Class struggle furthermore turns out to be also the issue at stake in that other debate of Žižek with Yannis Stavrakakis. In the concluding part the viability of Žižekian hauntology is questioned given the impossible politization of psychoanalysis and its skandalons

Beyond psychologisation: the non-psychology of the Flemish novelist Louis Paul Boon

Is not the most intriguing aspect of psychologisation seems to be that every critique threatens to bounce back in some kind of meta-psychologisation. Although in this day and age and age it seems highly unlikely to repeat the popular anti-psychiatry movement of some decades ago and to get an anti-psychology movement on the tracks, it would leave us immediately stranded in some kind of essentialization of the human being and its life-world. Are we thus lost in psychologisation? Is there no outside of psychology and psychologisation? In the following I will focus on the novel De Paradijsvogel (The Bird of Paradise) of the leftist Flemish novelist Louis Paul Boon. I will briefly juxtapose it with Christopher Lasch‘s seminal critique in his book The Culture of Narcissism and search for the germs of a non-psychology: which is, a critique on psychologisation which transcends the pitfalls of metapsychologisation and reopens the path of an ideology critique, the latter seemingly having become impossible too

Psychologization or the discontents of psychoanalysis

This article explores the possibility of a debate between psychoanalysis and the human sciences and, in particular, between psychoanalysis and psychology. Psychoanalysis's particular view on subjectivity values fiction (truth having the structure of fiction) as a constitutive dimension of personal and social reality. In contrast, the mainstream psy-sciences threaten to remain caught in the attempt to unmask things as they really are (eg, hard neurobiological reality), thus risking losing the subjective dimension as such. Drawing on examples of phenomena of psychologization (in Reality TV and in contemporary discourses of parent and child education), the author spells out the different, but eventually and necessarily intertwined, responses of psychoanalysis and psychology to modernity and modern subjectivity

From milgram to zimbardo: the double birth of postwar psychology/psychologization

Milgram’s series of obedience experiments and Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment are probably the two best-known psychological studies. As such, they can be understood as central to the broad process of psychologization in the postwar era. This article will consider the extent to which this process of psychologization can be understood as a simple overflow from the discipline of psychology to wider society or whether, in fact, this process is actually inextricably connected to the science of psychology as such. In so doing, the article will argue that Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s studies are best usefully understood as twin experiments. Milgram’s paradigm of a psychology which explicitly draws its subject into the frame of its own discourse can be said to be the precondition of Zimbardo’s claim that his experiment offers a window onto the crucible of human behaviour. This will be analysed by drawing on the Lacanian concepts of acting out and passage à l’acte. The question then posed is: if both Milgram and Zimbardo claim that their work has emancipatory dimensions — a claim maintained within mainstream psychology — does a close reading of the studies not then reveal that psychology is, rather, the royal road to occurrences such as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? The drama of a psychology which is fundamentally based on a process of psychologization is that it turns its subjects into homo sacer of psychological discourse

From La Mettrie's voluptuous machine man to the perverse core of psychology

Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709—1751) solved the problem of Cartesian dualism by denying the res cogitans any substance as such. He thus provided science with a basic paradigm which is still respected today. For La Mettrie, all aspects of the soul have to be considered as aspects of the res extensa: man is a machine. However, the emptying of the res cogito is not without a remainder. A zero level of subjectivity is left behind. This paper argues that it is through this remainder that modern subjectivity is structurally linked to the academic and, moreover, psychological gaze. It is further argued that the paradoxes of this modern stance are what prompt La Mettrie to put forward his voluptuous subject, his attempt to escape the abyss of the zero level of subjectivity. In this way, La Mettrie’s naturalized and scientific hedonism contains the germs of Marquis de Sade’s appropriation of the Enlightenment project. Hence this paper attempts to explore the extent to which La Mettrie’s L’homme machine, a key text in 18th-century materialism, has led to a perverse disposition in the modern psy-sciences

Almost-classical quantum computers

By means of a subgroup of the 2 X 2 unitary matrices, i.e. a subgroup Q of U(2), acting on a single qubit, we create a group X, acting on w qubits. If Q equals the group of order 2 consisting of the follower and the inverter, we recover S_{2^w}, i.e. the permutation matrices describing a classical reversible computer acting on w bits. If Q is another group of two 2 X 2 matrices, then a new kind of computing appears