This is the second and final written part of my MA exam. In this part, I was asked to evaluate the relevance of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the study of the humanities. Issues that came up during the oral defense include the materiality of language in Lacan (as cited in an article where Lacan interprets that…
Tag Archives: Art
She’d been roaring a long rant then she rambled on. He snarled stubbornly and barely stopped himself from strangling her. Silence in the middle of the street. He saw the tears in her eyes as she saw his face reddened. The afternoon wind blew, Shh . . . He hesitantly, slowly held her hand. She…
It has been a common thing in academic circles to talk about the travails of scholars-in-training (i.e. graduate students) in the field of the humanities, most notably in the “superfluous” concentrations of philosophy, literature, history, anthropology . . . (where scholars-in-training spend at least seven years of their “most productive lives” (their twenties) reading books…
[Ideology, the strategy game] To take the term literally, a system (-logy) of ideas (ideo-). That is to say, a collection of ideas (either about different things/aspects, e.g. on the economy, on social issues, on political power, etc. or as more or less similar positions (i.e. variants) on a given issue (whose differences are not…
Bruce Fink presents a more nuanced explication of Jacques Lacan’s (overly?) complex ontology in The Lacanian Subject compared to the more simple (although by no means easy) schematic of parallelisms that Alexandre Leupin establishes between Freud and Lacan in Lacan Today. Leupin’s explication, I think, (and not just because his explication is my first sustained…
In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche deploys a harsh critique of Socrates, whose influence, represented by the advent of Euripidean comedy in the Greek stage, he sees as having caused the emergence of a new struggle of forces (this time between the Socratic and the Dionysiac, in contrast to the former between the Dionysiac…
[Title page of Hobbes' Leviathan] In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser contributes to the Marxist discourse on the relationship between the base and the superstructure in order (as implied by his rhetoric) to go beyond it. Recounting the basic framework of what he calls a “metaphor of topography,” Althusser explains that “Marx conceived…
[Vincent van Gogh's Peasant Shoes and A Pair of Shoes] [Follows "Technology"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] Dis-close a particular cultural-historical world for a people (das Volk), grounded on the earth. Dasein is no longer the opening up of being; the world is opened…
[Image from Cartoonstock] In the preface (the “Attempt at Self-Criticism”) to The Birth of Tragedy, written more than ten years after the main text, Friedrich Nietzsche recapitulates the question he had broached in the work of his youth. He asks, “Is pessimism necessarily a sign of decline, decay, malformation, of tired and debilitated instincts [.…
[Image from Alternative Fuel Sources] [Follows "What is Dasein Like?"] [Based on Martin Heidegger’s “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics” and “The Question Concerning Technology,” as interpreted by Greg Schufreider] We in fact started with Dasein, der Mensch, the human being (but even then not, like Husserl and the rest of the tradition, as a transcendental…
