Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy

197 Pages·2013·0.793 MB·English

by  Justin Clemens

Psychoanalysis
is an
Justin Clemens
Antiphilosophy
PSYCHOANALYSIS IS AN
ANTIPHILOSOPHY
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PSYCHOANALYSIS
IS AN
ANTIPHILOSOPHY
Justin Clemens
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© Justin Clemens, 2013
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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printed and bound in Great Britain by
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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 7894 5 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 8577 6 (paperback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7895 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 0 7486 7896 9 (epub)
The right of Justin Clemens
to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction: Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy 1
1. Listening or Dispensing? Sigmund Freud on Drugs 17
2. Love as Ontology; or, Psychoanalysis against Philosophy 44
3. Revolution or Subversion? Jacques Lacan on Slavery 63
4. Messianism or Melancholia? Giorgio Agamben on Inaction 84
5. The Slave, The Fable 102
6. Torture, Psychoanalysis and Beyond 123
7. Man is a Swarm Animal 143
Bibliography 167
Index 185
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Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time coming, and I have acquired a large
number of debts along the way – for which a mention of my creditors
in an Acknowledgements page is hardly a minimal down-payment.
I am grateful to the School of Culture and Communication and the
Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne for giving me time off
to work on this book in 2008 and 2012. The publication of this book
was supported by the Faculty of Arts Publication Subsidy Scheme. I
will be forever indebted to my copy-editor Cathy Falconer, whose cor-
rections have not only signifi cantly improved this book, but have saved
me from some embarrassing errors. Haydie Gooder has been, as ever,
an impeccable indexer. I would like to thank Birkbeck College London
for hosting me as an Honorary Fellow in January 2012. Among the
many staff and students who discussed some of the points made here, I
would particularly like to thank Anton Schütz and Thanos Zartaloudis
for their incisive comments and suggestions. I must thank Richard Bell
and his gallerist Josh Milani for permission to reproduce Bell’s stunning
image for the cover of this book. I would like to acknowledge Deakin
University’s Psychoanalytic Studies programme, and those I worked
with there when a member of staff, especially Douglas Kirsner and Ron
Gilbert. I would like to thank everyone involved in the Lacan Circle of
Melbourne; if it is not too invidious to celebrate an individual in this
context, I would especially like to thank Susana Tillet, whose return
to Argentina several years ago has been a great loss to Australian psy-
choanalysis. I would like to thank my colleagues, friends and students,
notably Marion Campbell, Lorenzo Chiesa, Anna Cordner, Oliver
Feltham, Nicholas Heron, Helen Johnson, Sigi Jöttkandt, Adam Nash
and Jessica Whyte for their discussions and support. I am especially
indebted to John Frow, whose intellectual support, structural interven-
tions and editing suggestions have greatly improved this book. There
are, however, two people I would like to acknowledge above all. First,
my comrade A. J. Bartlett, without whom there would hardly be any
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Acknowledgements vii
point in continuing with – as Ezra Pound puts it in his parody of W. B.
Yeats’s ‘Lake Isle’ – ‘this damn’d profession of writing’. Second, Russell
Grigg, whose impact on my thinking about psychoanalysis has been
incalculable. It is to Russell that I dedicate this book.
Much of the material in this book has been previously published,
often in very different forms. I would therefore like to acknowledge the
editors and publishers of the following texts: ‘To Rupture the Matheme
with a Poem’, in J. Freddi, M. Noonan and M. Sharpe (eds), Trauma,
History, Philosophy (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2007), pp. 308–12; ‘The Jew’s Two Noses: Freud, Addiction, Cocaine’,
The UTS Review, 7:2 (2001), pp. 144–62; ‘The Field and Function
of the Slave in the Écrits’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 32
(2012); ‘The Abandonment of Sex: Giorgio Agamben, Psychoanalysis
and Melancholia’, Theory and Event (2010); ‘Love as Ontology:
Psychoanalysis against Philosophy’, in R. Brassier and C. Kerslake
(eds), Origins and Ends of the Psyche (Leuven: Leuven University
Press, 2007), pp. 185–201; ‘The Slave, The Fable’, in P. Morrissey
and G. Reifarth (eds), Aesopic Voices (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2011), pp. 45–73; ‘Man is a Swarm Animal’, in D. Hoens,
S. Jöttkandt and G. Buelens (eds), The Catastrophic Imperative: Time,
Subjectivity and Memory in Contemporary Thought (Basingstoke:
Palgrave-Macmillan, 2009), pp. 83–113; Review of Giorgio Agamben’s
The Sacrament of Language in Symploke, 19:1–2 (2011), pp. 414–16.
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Introduction: Psychoanalysis
is an Antiphilosophy
without the pursuit of I worship you
which is a French boxer
maritime values as irregular as the depression of Dada in the blood
of a bicephalous animal
Tristan Tzara, ‘Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher’1
WHY ANTIPHILOSOPHY?
Psychoanalysis is an antiphilosophy. Despite the precision of this
concept and this claim, their implications remain controversial. This
book thus introduces the concept of antiphilosophy, speaks of its con-
stitution and pertinence with respect to psychoanalysis, and examines
the consequences of such a determination through a sequence of case-
studies. Although the concept has some highly abstract aspects and a
somewhat forbidding intellectual history, it is deployed here, fi rst, as a
kind of corrosive of received ideas, and, second, as an affi rmative means
of characterising psychoanalysis that captures something essential, if
often elided, about the peculiar status of the practice.
‘Antiphilosophy’ is, as the most cursory research reveals, a word in
common use. It is for the most part deployed to designate an intellec-
tual hostility – that is, a hostility within thought itself – to ‘philosophy’
more or less broadly conceived. Hence one fi nds accounts of how this
or that religious thinker or theologian, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish,
Islamic or what have you, self-consciously arrays their thought against
the propositions and methods of philosophy. According to this general,
essentially religious acceptation, philosophy is constitutively incapable
of thinking what is most crucial, above all, the revealed truths of this
1 T. Tzara, Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries, trans. B. Wright, illustrations
F. Picabia (London: John Calder, n.d.), p. 19.
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