Cate Watson: Identification and desire: Lacan and Althusser versus Deleuze and Guattari. A short note @ International Journal of Žižek Studies 7 (2013)

Cate Watson: Identification and desire: Lacan and Althusser versus Deleuze and Guattari. A short note @ International Journal of Žižek Studies 7 (2013)

The paper constitutes an exploration of the construction of academic identities through a retrospective autoethnographic narrative analysis. In what is an essentially experimental mode I set out to examine processes of identification, and in particular, the understanding of desire that lies at the heart of them, for, it can be argued without desire there is no identity. Therefore, I begin my analysis by following two lines of thought concerning desire. The first, drawing on the work of Lacan, conceives of desire negatively as lack (Fink 1995; Lacan 2001). The second deriving from the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2004/1987, 2004/1972) constructs desire as abundance, a positive force. These two conceptualisations may, at first sight, appear to be opposed but is this necessarily the case? The question to be examined then is, to what extent can these two conceptualisations of desire – as lack and as abundance - be held to be incommensurable? And following this, can an unstable accommodation between desire as lack and desire as abundance be drawn on in theorising processes of identification and the subjectivities that these processes give rise to? If identification is always (already?) an inherently unstable process, located within a space, which I shall designate a narrative space, how does a mobilisation of desire which moves between lack and abundance enable a creative and experimental conceptualisation of processes of identification to emerge?
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Pic: Paul Gauguin "Christ in the garden of Olives"

Slavoj Zizek - The Return to Hegel @ EGS, Switzerland, 2009

L’ombra di Hegel. Althusser, Deleuze, Lacan e Badiou a confronto con la dialettica (a cura di Gaetano Rametta) - Polimetrica, It, Febbraio 2012

L’ombra di Hegel. Althusser, Deleuze, Lacan e Badiou a confronto con la dialettica (Gaetano Rametta a cura di)

Il presente volume si prefigge di mostrare la vitalità del confronto con Hegel nella filosofia francese del secondo Novecento, scegliendo quattro autori legati da rapporti espliciti di influenza reciproca, affinità nell’impostazione teoretica e talvolta da vivaci discussioni critiche. Il libro ricostruisce una porzione significativa di storia della ricezione di Hegel in Francia, che dai seminari lacaniani degli anni Cinquanta si dipana fino agli anni Ottanta del Novecento: così per la lettura hegeliana di Deleuze, che non sarebbe comprensibile senza la messa in luce della polemica, quasi sempre sotterranea ma non per questo meno radicale, con l’interpretazione di Hyppolite, suo professore alla Sorbona; così per l’intreccio che attorno a Hegel si annoda tra il marxismo strutturale di Althusser e la psicanalisi di Lacan, o tra questi ultimi e il pensiero di Badiou, teso a valorizzare Hegel come base per una nuova teoria materialistica del soggetto. 


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Kittler's Technosublime by Bruce Clarke

In the 1970s a number of texts came into English translation bearing titles with a 1-2-3 punch, mixing exemplary authors with generic modes and methodological issues; for instance, Roland Barthes's Sade, Fourier, Loyola and Image, Music, Text, containing the essays "Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein" and "Writers, Intellectuals, Teachers," and Michel Foucault's Language, Counter-Memory, Practice with the essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." The title Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, a cognate translation of the German, echoes these theoretical signatures.
In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter Kittler contrasts the restriction of Foucault's discourse theory to textual archives with his own wider media band, in which phonographic and cinematic data streams decenter the channel of literary writing. But his commentators agree that Kittler's "media discourse theory" follows from Foucault as the prime member of the triumvirate Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. Lacan runs a close second. Kittler writes: "Lacan was the first (and last) writer whose book titles only described positions in the media system. The writings were called Writings, the seminars,Seminar, the radio interview, Radiophonie, and the TV broadcast, Television" (170). Gramophone, Film, Typewriter partakes of this same postsymbolic media literalism.
I write about Kittler from the standpoint of a scholar of British and American literature who dropped from the tree of Columbia's core humanities curriculum to the seed-bed of canonical romanticism and modernism and the theory culture of the 1970s and 1980s, then passed through the forcing house of literature and science in the 1990s, to arrive at the threshold of contemporary media studies. In the process I seem to have become posthuman, but Kittler's work reassures me that I had no choice in the matter: "media determine our situation" (xxxix). Kittler parlays high poststructuralism into a historical media theory that humbles the subject of humanistic hermeneutics by interpellation into the discrete material channels of communication. Media studies bids to become a hegemonic site within the new academic order of a wired culture. For Kittler, media determine our posthumanity and have been doing so in technological earnest at least since the phonograph broke the storage monopoly of writing.(...)


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Simon O'Sullivan - Spinoza between Lacan and Foucault (abstract 2011)

Simon O’Sullivan (Goldsmiths) ‘The Care of the Self versus the Ethics of Desire (or, Spinoza between Lacan and Foucault)’

Is Foucault’s “Care of the Self” part of that ethical tradition that Lacan undermines in his seminar on The Ethics of Psychonalysis, or does the former in fact involve a different understanding of ethics that brings it closer to the psychoanalytic programme itself? Spinoza’s own Ethics will operate as the mediating term here, as well as offering insights into both Lacan and Foucault’s definitions of the ethical subject.