Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy

by Clemens, Justin

• ISBN13: 9780748685776
• ISBN10: 0748685774
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-08-01
• Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Summary

Love, hate, slavery, torture, addiction and death - as this book shows, only psychoanalysis can speak well of such matters. Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century, which left no practice from psychiatry to philosophy to politics untouched. Yet it was also in many ways an untouchable project, caught between science and poetry, medicine and hermeneutics. This unsettled, unsettling status has recently induced the philosopher Alain Badiou to characterise psychoanalysis as an 'antiphilosophy', that is, as a practice that issues the strongest possible challenges to thought. Justin Clemens takes up the challenge of this denomination here, by re-examining a series of crucial psychoanalytic themes: addiction, fanaticism, love, slavery and torture. Drawing from the work of Freud, Lacan, Badiou, Agamben and others, Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy offers a radical reconstruction of the operations and import of key psychoanalytic concepts and a renewed sense of the indispensable powers of psychoanalysis for today.

Author Biography

Justin Clemens is Senior Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Psychoanalysis is an antiphilosophy

1. Listening or Dispensing? Sigmund Freud on Drugs

2. Love as ontology

3. Revolution or Subversion? Jacques Lacan on Slavery

4. Messianism or Melancholia? Giorgio Agamben on Inaction

5. The Slave, The Fable

6. Torture, psychoanalysis, and beyond

7. Man is a swarm animal

Bibliography