The Virtual Point of Freedom: Essays on Politics, Aesthetics, and Religion (Diaeresis) - Softcover

Chiesa, Lorenzo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0810133733 ISBN 13: 9780810133730

Verlag: Northwestern University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The principal motif that runs throughout The Virtual Point of Freedom is a confrontation with the discourse of freedom, or, more specifically, the falsely transgressive ideal of a total emancipation that would know no constraints. Far from delineating a supposed “subject of freedom” that would allegedly overcome alienation once and for all, the seven chapters in Chiesa’s book seek to unfold an innovative reading of the dialectical coincidence between dis-alienation and re-alienation in politics, aesthetics, and religion, using psychoanalysis as a privileged critical tool. Topics include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s attack on the visual and biological degeneration of bodies brought about by pleasure-seeking “liberal” consumerism, Giorgio Agamben’s and Slavoj Žižek’s conflicting negotiations with the Christian tradition of “poverty” and “inappropriateness” as potential redemption, and Alain Badiou’s inability to develop a philosophical anthropology that could sustain a coherent politics of emancipation. The book concludes by sketching out the figure of the partisan, a subject who makes it possible to conceive of an intersection between provisional morality and radical politics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

LORENZO CHIESA is the director of the Genoa School of Humanities in Italy.

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The Virtual Point of Freedom

Essays on Politics, Aesthetics, and Religion

By Lorenzo Chiesa

Northwestern University Press

Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8101-3373-0

Contents

Preface, 
1 Topology of Fear, 
2 Pasolini and the Ugliness of Bodies, 
3 Wounds of Testimony and Martyrs of the Unconscious: Lacan and Pasolini contra the Discourse of Freedom, 
4 A Theater of Subtractive Extinction: Bene without Deleuze, 
5 Giorgio Agamben's Franciscan Ontology, 
6 Christianity or Communism? Zizek's Marxian Hegelianism and Hegelian Marxism, 
7 The Body of Structural Dialectic: Badiou, Lacan, and the "Human Animal", 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Topology of Fear

Psychoanalysis, Urban Theory, and the Space of Phobia

In the preface to his much acclaimed Warped Spaces: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2001), urban theorist Anthony Vidler emphasizes that "the intersection of spatial thought with psychoanalytical thought ... has been a preoccupation of social and aesthetic discourse since the turn of the [twentieth] century." Unfortunately, his laudable attempt to rethink such an intersection by means of the notion of a psychologically "warped" space relies on the mistaken assumption that psychoanalysis understands space as a mere "projection of the subject." According to this simplistic reading, Freud's and Lacan's notion of projected space would be nothing other than a "repository of all the ... phobias of [the] subject" and, as such, "full of disturbing objects and forms, among which the forms of architecture and the city take their place."

With a naive pre-Kantian move that completely ignores the complex dialectic of the subject-object relation in psychoanalytic theory, Vidler intends to oppose Freud's and Lacan's supposed privileging of the desiring subject as a generator of phobic spaces and to stress "the active role of objects and spaces in anxiety and phobia." In other words, as Vidler programmatically states with reference to the phobia of Little Hans, he is as interested in the warehouses and horse-infested streets of Vienna, the alleged phobic object, as in the sexual origins of Hans's phobic disorder, the alleged phobic subject. Vidler believes that, by giving space its due and focusing on its inherent "invasive and boundary-breaking properties," he finally obviates a persistent failure of psychoanalytic theory.

In addition to ignoring some of the most basic distinctions of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, such as, first and foremost, that between phobia and anxiety, Vidler's confusing critique also falls short with regard to his own incorrect premises. In the end, the only intersection of spatial and psychoanalytic thought he can concretely delineate is confined to the barren field of analogies. On the one hand, his ambitious aim is to promote the independent status of the phobic objects of architecture and, in his own words, reinscribe such objects as the "mirror" of a psychoanalytic theory that would rely excessively on the subject. On the other hand, his investigations often do not go beyond a paradoxical praise of the innocent spatial images contained in Lacan's early paper on the mirror stage and his related theory of the ego as an object. Thus, according to Vidler, we should pay special attention to the fact that the "I" is conceived by Lacan as a fortress, a "fortified camp."

Having said this, if we take into account the intersection between psychoanalysis and the theory of space from the standpoint of the former, could we not raise a similar objection to Freud? Does he not usually make a purely analogical use of architectural and urban references? For instance, in Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud describes the hysterical symptom as a monument: "Symptoms are residues and mnemic symbols of particular (traumatic) experiences. ... The monuments and memorials with which large cities are adorned are also mnemic symbols." In another passage of the same work, he compares neurosis with a monastery: "To-day neurosis takes the place of the monasteries which used to be the refuge of all whom life had disappointed." These admittedly pedagogic similes are extraordinarily effective in explaining a difficult concept in an accessible way, yet they do not surpass the level of the analogy.

In this chapter, it is my intention to show how Lacan's theory of phobia as exposed in his fourth seminar on object relations deals with space in terms that are far from being simply analogical. Not only does he produce in this work a topo-graphy of phobia, a description of the places of phobia, but he also proposes that phobia, as a particular form of symbolization/subjectivation, is a topo-logy, literally a signifying logos that creates space for the phobic subject. In addition to this, I also aim to sketch the outlines of a possible dialogue between Lacan's topological notion of phobia and Mike Davis's fascinating redefinition of the contemporary late-capitalist Western metropolis, especially Los Angeles, as a constellation of phobic objects. It is doubtless the case that Davis's colorful prose style indulges in an abundant use of psychoanalytic jargon: thus, the widening of Highway 126 is compared with a primal scene; the buildings of deconstructive architect Frank Gehry display a "paranoid spatiality"; and the visits paid by cougars to Californian suburban neighborhoods are a "return of the repressed." Yet Davis's remarkable investigation is far from depending on any superficial pseudo-critique of psychoanalytic theory or a compulsive need to psychologize his arguments.

The Oedipus Complex, Anxiety, and the Phobic Subject

In order to understand Lacan's theory of phobia properly, it is necessary to set it against the background of his account of the Oedipus complex and the role that anxiety plays in it. According to Lacan, the onset and resolution of the Oedipus complex provides the child with the necessary key to enter the symbolic order understood as the Law of culture, and, in this way, subjectivize himself. This is only possible if, in parallel, the child is sexuated, if he or she assumes his or her symbolic position as man or woman. More specifically, the child is introduced to the three logically sequential "stages" of the Oedipus complex, which work retroactively, by means of three different "crises." Each crisis is based on the subject's confrontation with a distinctive lack of the object. The child's chances of successfully subjectivizing — and sexuating — himself depend on the way in which he reacts to the encounter with the three forms of the lack of the object.

Frustration initiates the child to the first stage of the Oedipus complex: it is defined as an imaginary lack of a real object and should be associated with the mother's neglect of the child's appeal. Here, Lacan rethinks the "pre-Oedipal" dual relation between the child and the mother in terms of the triad child-mother-imaginary phallus. The child then accedes to the second stage as soon as he realizes that the mother is "deprived," that she lacks, in the Real, a symbolic object, the symbolic phallus. At this stage, the child is involved in an aggressively imaginary rivalry with the imaginary father in order to control the mother. This stage corresponds to the doxastic idea of what the Oedipus complex is: "loving" the mother and "hating" the father. Lastly, the third stage is initiated by the real father who shows the child that he is the one who has what the mother lacks:...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Northwestern University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0810133733
• ISBN 13: 9780810133730
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 148
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland