In this essay, I take as a starting point Foucault's rejection of two different ways of thinking about the future, prophecy and utopianism, and use this rejection as a basis for the elaboration of a more detailed rejection of them, invoking complexity-based epistemic limitations in relation to thinking about the future of political society. I follow Foucault in advocating immanent political struggle, which does not seek to build a determinate vision of the future but rather focuses on negating aspects of the current conjuncture. I extend this argument into an ethical register, arguing that the same arguments apply mutatis mutandis to our personal lives. I conclude by engaging with Jacques Lacan's account of subjectivity, and the interpretation of its political import furnished by Yannis Stavrakakis, drawing from these additional supports for my position, in particular the rejection of utopianism as an attempt to avoid limitation by the real.

Nel suo ultimo lavoro, Pensiero vivente: origine e attualità della filosofia italiana (2010), Roberto Esposito scrive che un tratto costitutivo della filosofia italiana, almeno a partire da Machiavelli, risiede nel superamento di quella particolare "tonalità necessariamente negativa" del pensiero contemporaneo che, dopo la cosiddetta svolta linguistica, pare essere in grado di "affermare solo attraverso la negazione," come se "una volta condizionata la possibilità del pensiero, e dunque anche dell'azione, alla trascendentalità del linguaggio, l'esperienza filosofica fosse di continuo risucchiata nello stesso gorgo entropico cui intende sottrarsi." 1 In questo senso, la fonte di ogni spazio e ordineil linguaggio, la società e così viasvanisce nelle tenebre della negatività. Secondo Esposito, questo è il tipico effetto retrospettivo di una "esigenza immunitaria" che, proteggendo la coerenza di un sistema "dai rischi impliciti della convivenza", solitamente "deve connotare l'originela comunità originariain termini talmente negativi, come caos primigenio o stato di natura, da determinarne la necessità della sua barratura." 2 Storicamente la parte migliore del pensiero filosofico Italiano, al contrario, si è distinta secondo l'autore per l'elaborazione di un pensiero vivente che interroga criticamente il problema dell'origine, e ne trae non una prospettiva statica e paralizzante, bensì l'energia tipica di un cominciamento e della sua forza originante.

Disclaimer: The case you are about to read is based on a publicized case captured on the animal planet series (Fatal Attractions). The case is fictionally embellished as I attempted to imagine from the inside out the compulsive nature of a very vivid and dramatic symptom.

While the philosophical idea of the return of revolution is becoming increasingly more popular and relevant today, the current body of literature thinking through it has tended to under-theorize and often neglect a crucial dimension of this return: the actuality of the revolution itself. This paper argues that we can locate a supplement to this problem in Deleuze and Guattari's constructivist political analysis. In particular, this paper demonstrates how Deleuze and Guattari's political analysis can help us illuminate the actuality of one of the most interesting revolutionary movements underway today: the Occupy movement.

This article attempts to outline some critical aspects of the accelerationist movement. More specifically, it argues that light can be shed on key aspects of the political proposals of Williams and Srnicek by considering them from the perspective of the socio-political reflections of both Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus is one crucial starting point for accelerationist thinking, in terms of the concept of the 'machinic' and the explicit reference to 'acceleration', but it is equally obvious that Lacan has been an important figure in the debate on the topic of 'desire'. Likewise, and for the same reasons, accelerationism offers the potential for a fruitful reconsideration of Deleuzian philosophy, and of the difficult relationship between schizo- analysis and psycho-analysis. We argue that, in the light of accelerationism, the perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan do converge, in particular around the theoretical articulation of the concep...

Granted that it would be absurd to characterize Obama as a populist president, this paper proceeds from Ernesto Laclau's conception of populism as consisting of 'the formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating the "people" from power' and 'an equivalential articulation of demands making the emergence of the "people" possible ' (2005:74). In the 2008 election, Obama was able to articulate a series of empty signifi ers, found in such slogans as 'Yes We Can,' which came to represent a new collective identity of the 'people', thus constituting an instance of populism par excellence. As support for this theory of populism and its implications for contemporary American political discourse, this paper deconstructs the previously held functionalist assumptions and modernization theories -especially those propagated within Latin American case studies -that consign populism to a developmental stage in the capitalist mode of production or a historical outcome of underdeveloped democratic institutions in order to imagine a new science of rhetoric capable of analysing the synecdochical, metaphorical, and metonymical components in the discursive construction of 'the American people'.

"In Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory, there is a precise place for Marx in relation to psychology. It is the place of truth in opposition to capitalism. It is also the place of subversion against adaptation. According to Lacan, psychology adapts people to the capitalist system, while Marx reveals the subversive truth that underlies the system. This truth emerges as the real symptom of a purely symbolic system. It is the symptom of a proletarianized subject reduced to the workforce that makes the work of the system. If this work can be psychoanalytically conceived as the work of the unconscious, its force can be Lacanianly conceived as the enunciating workforce that expresses the discourse articulated by the Other. This suffering workforce is a symptom that implies frustration and reasonably motivates workers’ struggle against
liberal capitalism."

"Como en un eterno retorno el tema del populismo vuelve a situarse entre las preocupaciones de las ciencias sociales. Este artículo propone una entrada al problema a partir de discutir críticamente la teoría del populismo de Ernesto Laclau desde sus primeros escritos hasta un trabajo de publicación reciente. A partir de identificar los avances y los nudos problemáticos se proponen reflexiones en torno a los caminos necesarios de recorrer en la construcción de una epistemología del populismo para el estudio del fenómeno en América Latina. En particular se alerta sobre la imperiosa necesidad de una configuración teórica para el estudio de las subjetividades y las identidades populares con el objetivo de comprender mejor avatares de la política latinoamericana donde el populismo ha adquirido una insoslayable relevancia.

Palabras clave: Populismo, Ernesto Laclau, teoría, epistemología, América Latina."

La relación entre teoría política y literatura quizás no pueda contarse entre las más fecundas si se la
compara con el vínculo que han establecido disciplinas como la filosofía, la historia y la psicología. Si
bien la política ha ocupado un lugar central en la literatura es difícil sostener que la teoría política haya
obtenido un sitio destacado. Una notable excepción  encontramos en la novela  La guerra del fin del
mundo de Mario Vargas Llosa, no porque el autor se dedique a la teoría política, sino por la
complicidad de la trama de la novela con ciertas perspectivas teóricas contemporáneas. En este
horizonte, el artículo tiene como objetivo realizar una lectura de La guerra del fin del mundo y sugerir su
relación con categorías centrales de la teoría política de inspiración posfundacional como
Heterogeneidad, Antagonismo, exterior constitutivo, significante vacío, discurso y hegemonía. El trabajo
que presentamos, de este modo, pretende aportar a la discusión de ciertas categorías teórico políticas
que muchas veces por su grado de abstracción han suscitado dificultades pero también ofrecer claves de
lectura de esta novela desde la teoría política actual.

El artículo recoge la elaboración de un estado del arte de 72 documentos que muestran el diálogo interdisciplinar entre la ciencia política y el psicoanálisis. En su elaboración se seleccionaron textos de orientaciones freudianas y lacanianas con tres lógicas de diálogo: investigaciones de lo político desde el psicoanálisis; investigaciones desde el análisis político con herramientas psicoanalíticas; y diálogos teóricos y metodológicos. Su contribución es pertinente ante la ausencia de revisiones de la literatura existente similares, además de propiciar un diálogo mutuamente enriquecedor entre la ciencia política y el psicoanálisis. Este último amplía el campo clínico al ofrecer herramientas que permiten comprender el espíritu de la época y romper con la epistemología homogenizadora de la ciencia clásica, al incluir la singularidad de los sujetos en los fenómenos políticos.

This article attempts to outline some critical aspects of the accelerationist movement. More specifically, it argues that light can be shed on key aspects of the political proposals of Williams and Srnicek by considering them from the perspective of the socio-political reflections of both Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari. Anti-Oedipus is one crucial starting point for accelerationist thinking, in terms of the concept of the 'machinic' and the explicit reference to 'acceleration', but it is equally obvious that Lacan has been an important figure in the debate on the topic of 'desire'. Likewise, and for the same reasons, accelerationism offers the potential for a fruitful reconsideration of Deleuzian philosophy, and of the difficult relationship between schizo-analysis and psychoanalysis. We argue that, in the light of accelerationism, the perspectives of Deleuze and Guattari and Lacan do converge, in particular around the theoretical articulation of the concept of the 'political'. Accelerationism, as many critics have noted, has numerous implications in the field of subjectivity and often falls into a general plea for a strong neo-Enlightenment. Hence we will attempt to explicate these implications by attempting to read accelerationism via the psychoanalytic categories of jouissance and fantasy. This last category, as Stavrakakis has shown, is directly linked to the political category of 'Utopia', and therefore provides an adequate theoretical basis for such a psychoanalytic reading of accelerationism. Should accelerationism be considered the only way out of the socio-political constraints of neoliberalism today? However we approach this question, the argument pursued here is that the best starting points for a critique of accelerationism are the concepts of jouissance, the state/capital relationship, schizo-analysis and paranoid ways of functioning.

This article presents an analysis of McCarthyite and Tea Party political discourse and explores the possibilities of utilizing populism as an analytic construct for making comparisons between the political and economic projects envisaged by these two conservative movements. Relying on a definition of populism as a universal discursive formation, this article argues that there is a similar structure to the discourses of McCarthyism and the Tea Party, which relies on the construction of a "left-oriented enemy," posed as a threat to the American values of freedom and independence historically tied to the nation's "founding moment." With this comparative discursive structure established, the article then explores the ideological differences between the movements and attempts to interpret them within a historical framework. This article concludes by asserting that cases of populism in the immediate postwar period such as McCarthyism were short lived compared to new cases of populism such as the Tea Party, insofar as the universal discursive structure of populism, which once proved to be an exceptional phenomenon within modern forms of political rule, is now becoming part of the institutionalized structure of democratic politics, evidenced by a number of cases taken in comparative-historical perspective.

Se examina la actitud ambivalente de Jacques Lacan hacia el materialismo a la luz de una escena puntual en la novela Bouvard et Pécuchet de Gustave Flaubert. Esta escena, en la que un manzano reviste la forma de un revolucionario, nos permite discutir la esencia problemática de la materialidad en Lacan. Se distinguen ocho formas de materialismo en la teoría lacaniana y se muestra su oposición con respecto a otras formas de materialismo rechazadas en la misma teoría.

Jacques Lacan’s ambivalent attitude towards materialism is examined at the light of a precise scene in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Bouvard et Pécuchet. This scene, in which an apple tree takes the form of a revolutionary, allows us to discuss the problematic essence of materiality in Lacan. Eight forms of materialism are distinguished in Lacanian theory and opposed to other forms of materialism that would be rejected in this theory."

Ideological topics referenced from the specific human rights legal cases from the borderland regions of Southeast Asia will be presented to select facilitators that will address the pragmatic considerations of the singular and universal. Private rights, sovereignty, and pressing questions of territory and property will be addressed in relation to the current wave of globalization.

Pensar lo social desde los "juegos de lenguaje" como posibilidad de la democracia: el momento wittgensteiniano en el pensamiento social y político de Ernesto Laclau y Chantal Mouffe Thinking about "language games" as a possibility of the democracy: the Wittgensteinian moment in the social and political though of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe Manuel Guerrero a.

LUTECIUM                             
                                      “TRAUMA AND EVENT”:
                  “A PROSPECTUS FOR AN EVENTAL PSYCHIATRY"
                                    VINCENZO DI NICOLA

VINCENZO DI NICOLA accepted Alain Badiou's challenge to either declare the death of psychiatry as such or announce a new, evental psychiatry in order to transform the field. Badiou supervised Di Nicola's doctoral dissertation, "Trauma and Event: A Philosophical Archaeology," which Badiou declared "opens a broad new horizon for philosophy and psychiatry" and was awarded Summa Cum Laude at the European Graduate School. Vincenzo Di Nicola, M.Phil., M.D., Ph.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal and President-Elect of the Quebec & Eastern Canada Branch of the American Psychiatric Association.

Date: May 17, 2013
Time: 6:00-8:00 pm (California time)
Location: The Flood Building downtown San Francisco
Online availability for long distance participation on Webex

For more information regarding registration please go to
WWW. Luteciumfoundation.com/events
Rebeccas@peoplepc.com

Recent films about militant figures reveal film rethinking the notion of resistance and the constitution of collectivity. These films share particular narrative and aesthetic effects. The militant in these films offers a figure for narrative agents engaged in the construction of collectivity, which appears both in the films' thematic use of biopolitical labor and embodied aesthetics. Militancy’s reappearance in cultural production highlights how the asymmetries of economic and political power in the twenty-first century solicit militant action as the pluralist multitude’s return of the repressed. Militants link individual, factions, and social totalities without consolidating them. I compare and contrast the use of militancy in contemporary cultural production with post-Marxist theories of the militant and multitude, paying particular attention to the work of Hardt and Negri in which the practice of the militant constructs multitude, the resistant non-unitary collective subject confronting global capital.

© Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, 2010 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, ...

El 25 de enero de 2015 la Coalición de la Izquierda Radical, SYRIZA en sus siglas en griego, ganó las elecciones en Grecia. Esta formación constituye un auténtico "caso único de éxito de la izquierda populista igualitaria en Europa" (Katsambekis, 2015: 172). Por ello, la victoria de SYRIZA desató un importante revuelo político, mediático y académico ya que dicha formación fue etiquetada con el apelativo de "populista" por sus propuestas, su ideología, su liderazgo, su discurso y su estrategia. Un conjunto de características dispares que difuminaban tanto el fenómeno SYRIZA como al propio concepto de populismo. La vinculación de la categoría con la demagogia como lógica explicativa contribuyó a vaciar al concepto de su potencialidad analítica. Por ello, en este trabajo se propone una definición analítica del populismo a la vez que se parte del supuesto de que es una categoría válida para explicar los acontecimientos políticos en Grecia y en el Mediterráneo.

There are two aspects of Lacanian psychoanalysis that may be particularly appealing to those on the critical margins of social psychology.  First, like discourse analysis and critical psychology, Lacanian psychoanalysis incorporates a focus on language (Branney, 2008) and therefore the concerns of some critical psychologists and discourse analysts, such as with critiquing the social order or bringing the social within psychology, may be easily assimilated.  Second, Lacanian psychoanalysis would seem to be incompatible with psychology (Parker, 2003) and therefore provides an alternative perspective from which to consider, and perhaps undermine, the assumptions of psychology.  Attempts to utilise Lacanian psychoanalysis that could be brought together under a rubric of critical psychology and discourse analysis include analyses of the production of girls’ desire in comics (Walkerdine, 1987), of views of the self in long-term psychotherapy (Georgaca, 2001; 2003), and of understandings of domestic violence in government policy (Branney, 2006).  We shall use ‘critical psychology’ (or ‘critical psychologist’) and ‘discourse analysis’ (or ‘discourse analyst’) as separate terms because, while many aspects of critical psychology do draw upon discourse analysis, a discourse analytic approach may be neither necessary nor sufficient to be critical of psychology.  Hollway’s (1989) consideration of heterosexual subjectivity is perhaps the one most obviously aligned with attempts, from the margins, to use discourse analysis to be critical of psychology.  Along with Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation, and Subjectivity (Henriques et al., 1984), Hollway’s Subjectivity and Method in Psychology: Gender, Meaning, and Science (1989) can be understood as an attempt to change the subject of psychology and the theory of subjectivity that psychology relied upon.  Hollway (ibid.) drew upon a mixture of discourse analysis, and Kleinian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to examine material from interviews and her journal.  But, as Hook so aptly puts it: the lack of engagement of critical social psychology with Lacanian psychoanalysis is an ‘oddity’ that is “striking inasmuch as Lacanian theory offers important insights into many of what we might consider the constituting problematics of social psychology” (Hook, 2008, p. 2), such as racism, ideology, and social identity.  If we are to combine Hook’s work (ibid.) with Georgaca (2005) and Parker (2003; 2005), we have what can be understood as a small body of work on the margins of psychology that elucidates Lacanian psychoanalysis for critical psychologists and discourse analysts.  Our focus is on Hook, Georgaca, and Parker, because they, whether explicitly or implicitly, explicate what Lacanian psychoanalysis would be if it were used in critical psychology and discourse analysis.  This small body of work is steadily growing and includes, for example, Frosh and Baraitser’s (in press) examination of psychoanalysis in psychosocial studies, a special issue of the journal Subjectivities and other work in this volume.  In this paper, our first aim is to turn to this body of work to put a bit more flesh on what Lacanian psychoanalysis offers those critical of psychology...

Ο Ζακ Λακάν αποτελεί αναμφίβολα μία από τις περισσότερο αμφιλεγόμενες προσωπικότητες της ψυχανάλυσης και γενικότερα των επιστημών του ανθρώπου. Το ιδιαίτερο και σκοτεινό ύφος των γραπτών και της διδασκαλίας του έρχεται σε χτυπητή αντίθεση με τη σαφήνεια και την ευγλωττία του Φρόιντ του οποίου τα έργα διαβάζονται περισσότερο σαν αστυνομικά μυθιστορήματα και λιγότερα σαν συνηθισμένα επιστημονικά συγγράμματα. Ο αμύητος αναγνώστης των λακανικών έργων θυμίζει τον νεαρό Ταίρλες (Törless), τον ήρωα του έργου του Ρόμπερτ Μούζιλ (Robert Musil)  με τίτλο «Οι αναστατώσεις του οικότροφου Ταίρλες» (εκδ. Πατάκη, 2001) ο οποίος επιχειρεί σε νεαρή ηλικία να διαβάσει την Κριτική του Καθαρού Λόγου του φιλοσόφου Ιμάνουελ Καντ και καταλήγει να αδυνατεί ακόμα και να αγγίξει το βιβλίο.
http://www.nostimonimar.gr/o-zak-lakan-pera-apo-to-anathema-ke-tin-prosopolatria/

While extremism of the Islamic Jihad movement is on one side of the global power wheel, bashing away at the fabric of democratic societies, constant pounding of Jihadist ideology through the media equally punishes participants of these societies.

Media viewers are often forced to fight back the only way they can, and often as a means of self-preservation, by turning the media off or switching media outlets. Many people resort to letters to the editor, Web blogs, and political rallies to try to change their world.

Somehow, things always seem to maintain balance. That is, until the next global blows come from a radical Islamist and the media carrying his message. Baudrillard said correctly in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place that there is no war without the media, echoing Marshall McLuhan as McLuhan’s ideas meld into the fabric of digital culture.

The irony of the situation is that with each new bludgeoning media message comes the masochistic urge to want to hear more, get hit more, be more and more astonished. Each polarizing moment comes through the television or video screen with new compelling horrors, promises that predict no end to destruction, and a devastating impact on those persons helplessly caught between the media and its terrorists.

Slavoj Zïzek in The Plague of Fantasies contends that our experiences in cyberspace are making us psychotic because we don’t have “the Master,” or ordering of the symbolic, to tell us what we really want. For Zïzek, with the limitless options available in cyberspace, and without this Master, which offers “protection,” we move out of freedom to the only available alternative, the realm of the psychotic.

Since, for Zïzek -- and Guy Debord, borrowing from Georg Hegel -- resistance must operate within the symbolic order, there is nothing outside but psychosis. So where is the person caught between the media and its terrorists to go for safety? What can the spectator do to protect her/himself and those who are part of his inner circle? Is turning off the radio or television akin to stepping outside the symbolic order? Is the only alternative the lifestyle and destiny of the Unibomber? Is the televised place of symbolic order between the media and its terrorists actually one of safety?

People are not free to shut themselves off from the media, not without consequences. Yet the consequences of being caught in the middle of the psychological war waged equally by terrorists as our enemies and the media as our allies is surely not being conducted without taking its toll, perhaps in the form of neuroses. For Zïzek, participating in cyberspace leads to psychosis, yet there are no psychosocial definitions for participating in electronic media of radio and television, no known adverse effects.

The space occupied by the global media as multinational conglomerates is the binary opposite of the space occupied by terrorists as rogue, rhizomic wanderers, and the rest of the globe’s inhabitants are caught in between the two. We are caught between their oppositional ideologies, between their tactical methods, and also between an extreme suggestion that the two are in a collusion, between their symbiotic relationship, between their dependence upon one another.

The extreme stance by the media to participate in every terrorist declaration buys into the extreme stance by terrorists whereby they expect such participation, and since there is little to no balance from the only side which is capable of exerting balance, we are caught in the middle, shutting off our televisions for the Internet, and, at the risk of sounding extreme, nursing a global neurosis with the pleasures of impending psychosis.

This paper examines the use of the notion of the Lacanian Real by certain contemporary political theorists i.e. Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. By going through their approaches to two core topics, that is to say on the one hand, the ways of the articulation of the subject and on the other the theorists' estimations for the political future of the West, important contradictions emerge. Do these "internal" contradictions reflect the case of the contemporary society as well? Accordingly, is the Lacanian Real embedded dramatically in our socio-political reality? By trying to figure out these questions, this paper wonders about the use of the Lacanian Real in Political Theory as well as about the potential of its enhancement.