Sex and Nothing: Bridges from Psychoanalysis to Philosophy

240 Pages·2016·12.832 MB·English

by  Alejandro Cerda-Rueda

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7548587304
S ü X dl J.
BRIDGES FROM PSYCHOANALYSIS TO philosophy
Edited by
ALEJANDRO CERDA-RUEDA
karnac

SEX AND NOTHING
Bridges from Psychoanalysis
to Philosophy
E d ite d b y
A le ja n d r o C e r d a - R u e d a
KARNAC
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2 1 JUL 2016
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First published in 2016 by
Karnac Books Ltd
118 Finchley Road
London NW3 5HT
Copyright © 2016 to Alejandro Cerda-Rueda for the edited collection, and to
the individual authors for their contributions.
The rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work have
been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Cover photo: Untitled. Copyright © 2016 to Andrea Tejeda Korkowski
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13: 978-1-78220-338-4
Typeset by Medlar Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd, India
Printed in Great Britain
www.karnacbooks.com
CONTENTS
ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS vii
INTRODUCTION xi
Alejandro Cerda-Rueda
PART I: FROM LJUBLJANA ...
CHAPTER ONE
Sexuality within the limits of reason alone 3
Alenka Zupančič
CHAPTER TWO
Officers, maids, and chimneysweepers 19
Mladen Dolar
CHAPTER THREE
Events through Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real 37
Slavoj Žižek
CHAPTER FOUR
The unsoundable decision of being 57
Jelica Šumič
CHAPTER FIVE
Psychoanalysis and antiphilosophy: the case of Jacques Lacan 81
Samo Tomšič
PART II: ... TO ELSEWHERE
CHAPTER SIX
The sexual compact 107
Joan Copjec
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mathematics in the bedroom: sex, the signifier,
and the smallest whole number 139
Sigi Jöttkanät
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ich-psychologie und Massenanalyse: a Žižekian reading
of Lacan's impasse 157
Gabriel Tupinamba
CHAPTER NINE
The aesthetic process as reversal 179
Christina Soto van der Plus
CHAPTER TEN
Love, psychoanalysis, and leftist political ontology 193
Daniel Tutt
INDEX 211
ABO UT THE EDITOR A N D CONTRIBUTORS
Alejandro Cerda-Rueda is a practising psychoanalyst in Mexico City.
He is Professor at Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico, and senior edi­
tor for Paradiso editores. He gained his PhD from the European Gradu­
ate School in Switzerland. He is the editor of Schreber. Los archivos de la
locura (2009).
Joan Copjec is an American philosopher, theorist, feminist, she is pro­
fessor of Media at Brown University. Her work focuses primarily on
the grounds of philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and film studies.
She is the founder of the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and
Culture at the University of Buffalo, as well as the Umbr(a) journal. She
has published Read My Desire. Lacan against the Historicists (mit Press,
1994; Verso, 2015), Imagine There's No Woman. Ethics and Sublimation (mit
Press, 2002), as well as various book compilations like Shades of Noir
(Verso, 1993), and Supposing the Subject (Verso, 1994).
Mladen Dolar is a Slovenian philosopher and former Advising
Researcher in theory at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht,
Netherlands. He teaches at the University of Ljubljana as well as the
European Graduate School, while his work focuses on psychoanalysis
and philosophy, including topics such as Hegel, French structuralism,
film (i.e., the work of Ernst Lubitsch), and music theory. His published
books in English are Opera's Second Death (Routledge, 2002), co-authored
with Slavoj Žižek, and A Voice and Nothing More (mit Press, 2006). He has
published various books in Slovenian.
Sigi Jöttkandt is the Senior lecturer for the School of the Arts and Media
at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research
interests are in nineteenth and twentieth century British and American
Literature (especially Henry James and Vladimir Nabokov), Lacanian
psychoanalysis, and contemporary French philosophy. Co-founder
of Open Humanities Press, and S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle for
Lacanian Ideology Critique. She has published Acting Beautifully: Henry
James and the Ethical Aesthetic (SUNY, 2005), First Love: A Phenomenol-
ogy of the One (re.press, 2010), as well as the edited collection Penumbra
(re.press, 2013), co-edited with Joan Copjec.
Christina Soto van der Plas was born in Mexico, she is currently a PhD
candidate of Romance Studies at Cornell University. Her work focuses
on the boundaries between life and forms of fiction and how this rede­
fines the aesthetic process of literature in a constellation of authors from
the twentieth century in Latin America. She has also translated into
Spanish Alenka Zupanac's book The Odd One In under the title Sobre la
comedia, published by Paradiso editores (Mexico).
Jelica Šumič is a Slovenian philosopher and researcher at the Institute of
Philosophy of the Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy
of Sciences and Arts. She also teaches at the University of Nova Gorjca
and is member of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and
Philosophy. Her research topics include ethics, political theory, and
psychoanalysis. She has written on the relations between legal systems,
ethics, and politics, as well as on the philosophy of Badiou, Rancière,
and Agamben. She has published in French, Singularité dans la psycha­
nalyse, singularité de la psychanalyse (puf , 1998) co-authored with Michel
Deguy, as well as various books in Slovenian, and articles for different
English-based journals such as Umbr(a).
Samo Tomšič is a Slovenian philosopher and postdoctoral researcher
at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany. He has written on
structuralism, psychoanalysis, and continental philosophy, as well as
translated numerous classical and contemporary authors into Slovenian.
He has published The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan (Verso,
2015), and Jacques Lacan. Between Psychoanalysis and Politics (Routledge,
2015), co-edited with Andreja Zevnik.
Gabriel Tupinambâ was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he is a practic­
ing analyst, a member of the international collective Pensée, and the
coordinator of the Circle of Studies of the Idea and Ideology. PhD by
the European Graduate School, he has published the book Hegel, Lacan,
Žižek (Atropos, 2013), as well as written chapters in The Žižek Diction­
ary (Acumen, 2014), Repeating Žižek (Duke University Press, 2015), Žižek
and Education (Sense, forthcoming), and Žižek and Dialectical Materialism
(Palgrave, forthcoming). He is currently working on a new book called
Thinking, in Psychoanalysis.
Daniel Tutt was born in Portland, Oregon (United States), he is pro­
fessor of Media Studies and Critical Theory at the Global Center for
Advanced Studies (gcas ). He is a member of the Lacanian Forum of
Washington, DC. His work focuses primarily between psychoanaly­
sis, philosophy, and politics. His writing has appeared in Philosophy
Now, Platypus Review, International Journal of Žižek Studies, and The San
Francisco Society for Lacanian Studies.
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is senior
researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the Univer­
sity of Ljubljana in Slovenia. Distinguished professor of German at New
York University, and international director of the Birkbeck Institute for
the Humanities in London. His work mainly focuses in bringing phi­
losophy (Hegel), psychoanalysis (Lacan), and politics (Marx) together.
Some of his books published in English are The Sublime Object of Ideol­
ogy (Verso, 1989), The Plague of Fantasies (Verso, 1997), The Parallax View
(mit Press, 2006), Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical
Materialism (Verso, 2012), amongst various chapters written for books
and articles published in journals and newspapers.
Alenka Zupančič is a Slovenian philosopher and full-time researcher
at the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and visiting professor
at the European Graduate School. Her work focuses on psychoanalysis
and philosophy, tackling several topics including ethics, comedy, and
love. She has published in English: Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan
(Verso, 2000), The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two
(mit Press, 2003), The Odd One In: On Comedy (mit Press, 2007), and
Why Psychoanalysis? (Aarhus University Press, 2008), amongst various
chapters for books and articles for journals.