Giving What I Do Not Have to Someone Who Does Not Need It: Reading Erotic Parapraxis in Plato's Symposium with Levinas and Lacan

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] But before he is dead, wait, and do not yet call him happy, but fortunate. --Solon (1) Prologue What does the history of philosophy look like from the perspective of psychoanalysis? In the present essay, I propose to consider a specific moment in the history of philosophy, namely, the intervention of eros in the historical transition from Herodotean inquiry to Platonic philosophy. If psychoanalysis makes a difference as to how we understand the history of philosophy, what can it tell us about the significance of eros for the tradition of philosophy initiated by Socrates? In asking this question, my aim is twofold. First, I want to demonstrate that a psychoanalytic approach to the history of philosophy not only is plausible, but that by virtue of its insight into the wishes and fantasies that motivate human behavior, it can help us to understand how eros intervenes to motivate the Platonic account of the Socratic unity of happiness and philosophy. Where the historical significance of this account is at stake, we shall have to investigate both the prehistory of the Socratic tradition and its major connection to a Platonic account of the eros for philosophy. Hence my second aim: to demonstrate the central importance of Plato's Symposium in this psycho-historical drama. My argument is not simply that the Symposium is amenable to psychoanalytic interpretation, as readers like Jacques Lacan (1991 [1957]) and Jonathan Lear (1999) have already demonstrated. (2) Rather, my argument is that psychoanalysis offers a powerful vocabulary for understanding the genesis of philosophical eros, and that the Symposium is likewise a key resource for illuminating the prehistory of Socratic philosophy precisely because its account of the eros for philosophy is traceable to the Herodotean inquiry concerning Solon's role in an ancient quarrel about the meaning of happiness. My argument, in short, is that the eros for philosophy has its source in an all too human dynamic of seduction, and that the psychoanalytic theory of seduction is uniquely capable of elaborating the account of philosophical seduction in the Symposium--precisely because the psychoanalytic and Platonic accounts share the same fundamental structure. To be clear: I am not arguing that either Solon or Herodotus is the sole antecedent to the Socratic tradition, nor that one cannot find older or more diverse sources for the constellation of themes that link Herodotus to Plato through what I shall call the Solonian legacy in Socrates. Rather, my argument is concerned to show that a certain collection of themes converge in the figure of Solon, and that by virtue of their transformation in the Symposium, it is possible to consider both Plato's indebtedness to the Solonian teaching, as well as the specific terms of his divergence. For introductory purposes, I cite four fundamental themes that define the appearance of Solon's legacy. (3) 1. A tension between olbos and eudaimonia in the text of Herodotus, and a related connection between happiness and seeing the whole, which anticipates the valorization of eudaimonia as the highest expression of philosophy in Plato. 2. A transformation in the relation between happiness and death from Solon to Socrates. Whereas Solon commands us to call no one happy until dead, the practice of dying or being dead is itself the expression of happiness for Plato's Socrates. 3. A consideration of jealousy as an impediment to happiness. Whereas the jealousy of the gods points, for Solon, to the fluctuations of fortune that ruin human happiness, in the Socratic teaching human happiness requires a special kind of endurance with respect to those same dire elements. Coupled with the teaching of Diotima, this endurance will define human happiness in terms of friendship with the gods. 4. A reference to Solon's famous injunction to continue learning even while growing older. …

Reviewed by: Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel Thomas L. Cooksey Eckart Goebel, Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan. Trans. James C. Wagner. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2013. xiv + 259 pp. Eckhart Goebel offers lucid and illuminating explorations of the concept of sublimation in Goethe, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, important influences on Sigmund Freud’s thinking, as well as chapters on Thomas Mann, Theodor Adorno, and Jacques Lacan, each responding to Freud. The theory of sublimation informs much of the modern discourse on the nature of civilization and art, raising questions about the tensions between the individual and culture, the repression of instinctual drives, the limits of language, along with consequent problems of discontent, pessimism, and the meaning of happiness. Much of this discourse draws on Freud. That said, Freud’s own views on sublimation are unsettled and fragmentary, scattered throughout his works. Sometimes he treats it as a creative substitution, as in the cases of Goethe and Leonardo; sometimes it is a forced renunciation, a struggle to transcend natural drives. At other times Freud treats it dialectically as the history of the individual’s object-choices. Taking up Freud’s admonition that “it would be wiser to reflect upon this [sublimation] a little longer” (ix), Goebel shows that the notion of sublimation is not so much a single doctrine as a continuing debate on the relationship between the self and nature, the individual and civilization. While a notion of the sublime can be traced back to Plato’s Symposium, Goebel begins fruitfully with Goethe’s struggle with the tension between passion and artistry as both paradigm and provocation. He focuses on a close reading of the so-called Trilogie der Leidenschaft—“An Werther,” “Die Marienbader Elegie,” and “Reconciliation”—finding in them a pattern that begins with resignation but is then reconceived in terms of the sublime. Unbearable and even destructive desires are resigned to artistic expression; yet in signifying them, the experience of the unspeakable sublime is made possible, and in this lies a source of happiness. Schopenhauer’s notion of sublimation grows out of the metaphysical coexistence between our drives and our representations of the world and ourselves. Anticipating Freud, he argues that our sublimated desires are never truly forgotten, merely repressed in an attempt at ascetic mortification. We are left with the consolation of momentarily losing the self in music. Nietzsche shifts the focus to the psychological, distinguishing a “false” sublimation predicated on ascetic renunciation from a “good” version aimed at a transformation and intensification of life. Versions of sublimation are central to Nietzsche’s ideas on genealogy and metamorphosis. Goebel distinguishes three domains. In the realm of culture, sublimation is the accompaniment of civilization; the Apollonian acts as the sublimation of the Dionysian. In the realm of psychology, it opens the concept of genealogy and the “unmasking” of the layers of desire sublimated in our morality, revealing for Nietzsche the “spirituality of cruelty” (64). Finally, in the realm of philosophy, [End Page 296] sublimation is about overcoming the dualism between reason and body in a more intensified experience. Focusing on Morgenröthe, Goebel discusses Nietzsche’s attempt to integrate the spiritual with the drives in a way that goes beyond discontent to an idea of happiness. The chapter devoted to Freud traces his shifting but finally unresolved views on sublimation. In one use of the concept, sublimation emerges as a response to the tensions between the pleasure and reality principles, the need to repress natural drives and protect the ego without falling into neurosis and narcissism. In other cases it suggests a transcendence of natural drives into a realm of disinterested action, as in the creativity of Goethe or Leonardo or in the dispassionate science of Freud himself. In either case sublimation is about repressing nature. Here Goebel excavates Freud’s profound and explicit debt to Thomas Hobbes. Sublimation is central to Thomas Mann’s art. On one level, for instance, Aschenbach’s aesthetic response to Tadzio’s smile in A Death in Venice can be read as a creative sublimation; on another, it is a narcissistic response to a narcissistic smile. Unlike Freud, however, Mann seeks not to transcend...

Recent research on “psychotherapy” in Greek philosophy has not been fully integrated into thinking about philosophy as a way of life molded by personal relationships. This article focuses on how the enigma of Socratic eros sustains a network of thought experiments in the fourth century BCE about interpersonal dynamics and psychical transformation. It supplements existing work on Plato's Symposium and Phaedrus with comparative material from Aeschines of Sphettus, Xenophon, and the dubiously Platonic Alcibiades I and Theages. In order to select and illuminate commonalities among all of these, it also draws critically upon Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic technique and his numerous comparisons between Socrates and psychoanalysts. What emerges is a more complex and qualified but no less sincere appreciation for the ideal of reflective, cooperative aspiration toward Beauty portrayed in Plato's dialogues.

Taking Another Look at Levinas on Love Set me as a seal upon your heart. For love is as strong as death. Shir Hashirim [Song of Songs] In "Questions to Emmanuel Levinas," Luce Irigaray criticizes Emmanuel Levinas's conception of love by claiming that for Levinas, "to caress consists not in approaching the other in its most vital dimension, the touch, but in the reduction of that vital dimension of the other's body to the elaboration of the future for himself."1 That is, Irigaray interprets Levinas's conception of love as that which needs to be redeemed by fecundity and which is only redeemed for the man. Levinas 's work, she charges, does not account for the female experience in sexuality, degrades the woman by rendering her experience in sexuality as that which is devoid of the divine, and finally, it maintains a structure that privileges heterosexuality. Irigaray's analysis of Levinas's work points to what might be considered the most damning elements of Levinas's thought, and her view needs to be taken seriously. However, I think there are alternative readings of Levinas's conception of the "feminine" in general and his description of love in particular. My goal in this essay is to re-examine Levinas's conception of love that we find in Totality and Infinity,2 while being mindful of Irigaray's worries about this conception. This task is completed in part by taking seriously Levinas's claim in the preface to Totality and Infinity that Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption is "a work too often present in this book [Totality and Infinity] to be cited" (TI 28/xvi).3 The Labor of Love In contrast to the ethical relationship, Levinas identifies the love relationship as a return to the same. Yet for Levinas, the role the feminine plays in making transcendence possible extends beyond the dwelling and into the erotic relationship. Following a structure that we find in both Sartre and Rosenzweig, Levinas's description of the love relationship is a relationship wherein what the lover wants is not just to love the other [the beloved], but to have the Beloved love him back.4 Love both presupposes the exteriority of the other while also going beyond this exteriority of the other, of the beloved (TI 254/232). Taking up the Aristophanes myth in Plato's Symposium, Levinas's view of love is a mixture of immanence and transcendence (TI 254/232). Levinas disagrees with the implication of fusion signaled by the myth.5 However, he does find compelling the ambiguous notion of love not only as a relation in which there is a return to the self, but also as a relation in which the self is transcended. The face of the other-of the beloved-reveals within it what is not yet. It reveals the future that is never future enough, a future that is "more remote than possible" (TI 254-55/232-33). Finally, the ambiguity of love lies in the possibility of the Other to appear as an object of need and yet still retain its alterity, "the possibility of enjoying the Other, of placing oneself at the same time beneath and beyond discourse." The love relation is ambiguous precisely because the ethical has not disappeared. Rather, the face of the Other is hidden by the erotic, by the intimacy of love. In the "Phenomenology of Eros" Levinas tells us that "love aims at the other; it aims at him in his frailty [faiblesse]" (TI 256/233). Love aims at the tenderness of the Beloved. For Levinas, the tenderness is not something added to the Beloved. Rather, the Beloved "is but one with her regime of tenderness" (TI 256/233).6Levinas's analysis continually uses language that presents the image of the Beloved cast below while the lover is taken to new heights. The Beloved is "dark," "nocturnal," "clandestine," "deep in the subterranean dimension" (TI 257/234). The Beloved equivocates between virginity 7 and profanation (or solicitation), between modesty and immodesty (TI 257-58/234-35), between hiddenness and exposure. …

When he headed for Italy in spring, 1818, Percy Shelley left behind at Marlow life-sized plaster casts of Belvedere Apollo and Medici Venus which had presided over his reading of Plato and his writing of Laon and Cythna (MWS Letters 1: 38, 38n and White 1.505). Reading A. W. Von Schlegel's Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature on way to Italy, a work that describes Greek classical drama as fundamentally analogous to sculpture, he anticipated a less bookish, more direct encounter with sculpture and architecture of classical civilizations (MWS J 16-21, march 1818). Like his modern Greek protagonists in Laon and Cythna, he sought to regenerate from Mediterranean culture material ruins of a classical Greek of civic liberty. Halting for summer in cool retreat of Bagni di Lucca, however, Shelley continued to analyze Greek culture through its texts--first working on a translation of Plato's Symposium and then, in late July, drafting his second try at an introduction to dialogue (Weinberg 21; Jones, xiii). This essay, which he titled on Manners of Antient Greeks, opens a cosmopolitan defense of classical Athenian manners in love--that is, of their practice of homoeroticism. Homophobia had blocked modern British readers from accepting Plato's portrayal of love between men as a desire for ideal beauty & equal to that in Phidias' and Praxiteles' sculpture. In this essay, then, Shelley attempts a sympathetic explanation of that difference in sexual orientation; and he mediates that explanation through an appeal to beautiful forms of sculpted human figure. Yet, as he works through drafts of essay in two different notebooks, his argument becomes a different sort of cosmopolitanism, one that would in his view be more inclusive and egalitarian. For Greek homoeroticism, he argues, mars otherwise perfect society of ancient Greece because it excludes a heterosexuality based upon intellectual and civic liberty of women. (1) The mediating, persuasive form of his argument is loveliness--the desirable beauty--of human form. Shelley begins drafting this preface in a small notebook (Bod. MS. Shelley adds. e. 11) just after fragment On Love. In that essay, which Donald Reiman and Steven Jones suggest was his first try at writing an introduction to Symposium translation (Jones xiv, xx n. 8; Reiman, SC VI, 638-47), he analyzes idea of epipsyche or mental projection of an version of self as an object of desire. Having explored consequences of pursuing such an ambiguous in Alasto, his reading of Phaedrus on August 4-5 would have grounded this concept more firmly in Athenian culture (MWS Journal 217-18; Halperin, Diotima 269, citing Phaedrus 255c-e). Following On Love in notebook, Discourse also associates loveliness with an idealizing image-making by lover. Though pages of these drafts include scarcely any of his characteristic visual sketches, his verbal text immediately evokes this visuality, first, with graphically expressive title, written with a flourish, and then with content. Shelley opens his Discourse by asking, What was combination of moral & political circumstances which produced [unc] unparallelled a progress ... in literature & and why it so soon recieved a check are problems left to ... posterity to wonder over, as the ruins of a fine statue obscurely suggest to us grandeur & perfection of whole (17-18). This powerful simile of sculpture as bridging time even in its ruined state leads into a consideration of original and interdependent grandeur of all arts practiced in classical Greece. Though little evidence of their painting remains except for verbal description, Their sculptures are such as we in our presumption assume to be models of truth & beauty & ^to which with all no artist of modern times can produce anything com forms in any degree comparable (18). …

The Phoenix Complex

This dissertation is in an attempt to read the trajectory of the proper name of Ha(w)thorne who is interpellated as a subject by the symbolic gesture of his adding letter “w” to his family name. In this light, this small object “w” can be treated as an index of the place where the master signifier for the I-subject will come about. The master signifier, according to Jacques Lacan, designates the “quilting point” that intervenes while rendering complete an infinite series of signifiers. It helps clarify the fact that the subject is constituted in response to the real lacking-being in the Other (incarnated in Society, Culture, and Nation). Following Lacan, I maintain that to access and reassess the “proper” place assigned for Ha(w)thorne calls for an infinite conversation with such extimate substance as the letter “w” that precedes and pre-exists prior to Ha(w)thorne as a subject. The institution of the master signifier not only constitutes the subject in the field of the Other but maps the location of (national) culture, the lost Thing of which can only be retrieved in the locus of the Other. The introduction is centered on the heated debate between Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas on the “proper name,” from which the notion of master signifier is brought up. To compromise with the master signifier, an individual not only experiences the Althusserian interpellation but acknowledges his assigned place in the Other, which proffers a network of signifiers to actualize the subjective existence (“meaning”) in the Symbolic Order. Chapter One deals with the twisted relation between the misrecognized act of Utopian Imaginary and American modernity. I contend that utopia comes into existence on the account of the “nostalgia for the vanishing present,” is actually a counterpart of (American) modernity itself. Utopia is an empirical example of the radical transformation of modernity as well as the epistemological rupture. Meanwhile, it refers to the impossible jouissance of modernity: that is, to enjoy oneself without an alienating substance. In this sense, I maintain that the breakdown of utopia and its praxis lies not in alienation or false consciousness but in the impossible condition of “total” enjoyment. The alienating and preponderant object of individual subjects, which constitutes the subjective fantasy, is the hindrance to “total” enjoyment. The failure of utopian imaginary as a line of flight from the grip of modernity is best seen in Zenobia’s “death.” In Chapter Two, I utilize the Lacanian notion of the Thing to tackle the Hawthorne moral edifice, hinged upon the presumes evil as the dark necessity. According as the Thing reveals, we catch a glimpse of the sublime jouissance, an inherent transgression within the (moral) Law. It sheds light on the bar or self-split of the Law, the cross-bar of which is called the (evil) Thing (of Jouissance). In Chapter Three, I tackle the “Hawthorne and Woman” question from the perspective of Lacan’s logic of sexuation. To avoid the pitfalls of dualism or ideological critique of uneven representation of the sexual difference, I intend to re-address the signification of women characters in Hawthorne, whose existence is determined by the agency of the phallus. To write off the real-impossible sexual relationship, Hawthorne, as I will demonstrate, resorts to the convention of courtly love in which the empirical woman is elevated to the dignity of the (Woman-)Thing. In this sense, Woman (as a Non-Whole) marks the limit of male fantasy (epistemology) from which the male characters derive their phallic jouissance. Chapter Four is aimed at the agency of the scarlet letter “A,” which, with its sublime process, marks the lost “Thing” of the imagined community. The letter “A” designates the lack in the big Other, which requires the master signifier to intervene and actualize its potential meaning. On the other, only with the letter “A” can we articulate the archaic in the locus of the Other in a retroactive act of narration.

This essay performs a comparative reading of the themes of language, otherness and subjectivity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan. Their focuses on the place and role of an ethical subjectivity who is profoundly affected and displaced by the (non)presence of the absolute Other provide apt philosophical material for comparison and contrast. Through a close analysis of the important philosophical and psychoanalytic themes in Levinas’ early work Totality and Infinity and Lacan’s Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, I demonstrate how the different articulations of alterity in both influence their separate conceptions of the possibility of ethics in relation to decentered notions of subjectivity. In reading both, I argue that Lacan’s treatment of otherness and the eccentric nature of language provides a reimaging of certain gaps in Levinas. In return, I position Levinas as being able to provide a notion of ethical community that Lacan leaves out.

Une critique du paradigme tragique en psychanalyse à partir de la conception éthique de la subjectivité chez Emmanuel Levinas. De l’assomption tragique au soupçon comique de la castration

<i>Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350–1600</i>. Ryan McDermott. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. Pp. xiv+432.

December 31, 2007. On a day when it is common to reflect on the events of the year just ending, some, no doubt, asked if this was the year when an important movement in social theory ended. This, 2007, was the year Jean Baudrillard died. His passing marks the disappearance of the last of the notables of the postwar traditions of French social thought. Only Claude Levi-Strauss, approaching 100 years, survives Baudrillard, but he has long been silent as a writer. To be sure, Baudrillard was not the greatest figure in the movement--even allowing that French social thought, as a philosophical dispensation, defied the very idea of greatness. Great or not, so many of its important personages died before their time--Michel Foucault, most strikingly (1984), but also Nicos Poulantzas (1979), Roland Barthes (1980), Jacques Lacan (1981), Michel de Certeau (1986), Louis Althusser (1990) Felix Guattari (1992), Gilles Deleuze (1995), Emmanuel Levinas (1995), and Jean-Frangois Lyotard (1998). A few died closer to Baudrillard's time--Pierre Bourdieu (2002) and Jacques Derrida (2004). It was not that they were all young in death but that their followers desired more from them and mourned their silences. One marks the incompleteness and idiosyncrasy--the oddball irregularity--of such a list by adding names of others who had little to do with tout Paris in the 1960s and after: Erving Goffman (1982), Edward Said (2003), and Richard Rorty (2007)--each of whom engaged the French from the remove of North America. Goffman's absent Self, Said's orientalized English novel, and Rorty's contingent philosophy beyond the mirror of nature were eerily close to French preoccupations in their days. They shared an appreciation for the eclipse of the strongly centred modern culture. Aside from the early translators and heirs of the French in North America, in the early period after 1968, only Immanuel Wallerstein's The Modern World-System, I (1974), with its indebtedness to Ferdinand Braudel and Fanon, could be described as critical of the centre--a critic working in, if not of, North America. The French movement had everything to do with the death of an old order and the discovery of loss, mourning, and absences. In the years before his death, Derrida allowed publication of an English language col lection of his funereal orations (The Work of Mourning, 2001). The collection is apt to the question of endings for reasons other than Derrida's own seriousness about the centrality of death to the work of philosophy--a disposition he took in large part from Ldvinas, hence Heidegger. Neither Derrida nor any of the French of this time were strictly devoted to a line. Instead, they took up a philosophical, literary, political, even scientific, attitude that stood them at odds with modernity's prevailing ideology of centres, sources, subjects, ends, and progresses. Derrida's decentring thought--again not a method but an orientation--began with the ubiquity of absence. This, of course, is exactly what made the movement so inscrutable in much of North America, especially those loosely united states of mind to the south that cling still and anxiously to a philosophy of positive truth and a politics of normal progress. If there is a single starting point for the French philosophy of absences it is neither Heidegger nor Freud, important though they were in the formation of the various divergences within, and characteristic of, the movement. It was, oddly, a thinker whose enduring ideas were something of an afterthought in a small, if distinguished, academic life. Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics comprises the posthumous notes from his course in general linguistics at Geneva from 1906-1911. Gathered by loyal students after his death, Saussure's structural linguistics were literally written from death by a man who, in life, was and remains a missing person. Little is known of his life, except that he spent a number of years in Paris, early in his career, before retiring to his native Geneva. …

Throughout the twentieth century, vision has been part of the thinking of a number of philosophers and psychoanalysts. In this chapter, I discuss some of the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas. What will be exposed in this exploration of philosophical concepts of vision is the type of relation that is implied in each of them; the way in which they theorize both the spectator and the one who, or that which, is seen; the way in which they conceptualize the effect of the visual relationship on each of its participants.

This book is a challenging and inventive study of the face and faciality in medieval French literature. Alice Hazard’s core project is to rethink faciality, defined here as ‘the quality of being a face’ (p. 202), in a way that destabilizes and uncouples this concept from its associations and apparent affinities with the physiological face. Hazard also challenges the traditional view that the human face in medieval literature might offer any kind of reliable guide to individual subjectivity or interiority. She is more interested in the philosophy of faciality and the shifting planes and patterns of perception in medieval literature — its ‘engagement with the productive illusion of interiority’ (p. 146) — than, for example, the face as the site of gesture, physiognomic character, the expression of emotion, or the marker of ethnic or racial difference. The book’s conclusion makes it clear that, for Hazard, the face is not a text to be deciphered; but, in its mutability and instability, it is a ‘literary motif, a cultural model and a philosophical construct’ (p. 206). Four core chapters consider the face in Arthurian romance, in ‘doodles’ in the decorated margins of manuscripts (p. 82), in the opening scenes of Le Roman de la Rose, and in selected fabliaux. All four chapters explore the inherent and productive instability of faciality. Hazard draws her theoretical inspiration variously from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Lacan, Silvan S. Tomkins, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Judith Butler, and others, while also engaging with recent scholarship and criticism on medieval French literature. Most of her primary texts and her theoretical approaches are oriented towards secular literature. This means that her reading of Levinas, for example, is somewhat selective, as she interprets his conception of otherness through the face primarily as a relationship with another subject, not with the divine. Throughout this book, Hazard consistently steers us away from the face as a stable sign that might be confined to or co-extensive with the physiological features on the front of our heads. For instance, her reading of the armed and helmeted combatants in Old French romances leads to a very subtle argument about the dispersal of faciality onto ‘codified facial surfaces’ such as the knight’s helmet and shield which both constitute the ‘facing surface’ of the knight and therefore, his face (pp. 148, 207). The chapter on Le Roman de la Rose uses Deleuze and Guattari to read the wall around the garden of Deduit as an example of faciality, while the discussion of the relationship between faces and genitalia in the fabliaux affirms how little one needs, in the surreal and improbable world of these stories, to make a face (p. 176). This book reads like a PhD that has been adapted — not entirely successfully — for publication as a monograph. It is somewhat weighed down by the burden of its theoretical material, and its prose is careful and dutiful rather than elegant or lively; nevertheless, it is a strikingly original book that makes a powerful intervention into contemporary theories of the face and faciality.

Martin Heidegger is now widely recognized as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. Until the late 1960s, this impact derived mainly from his early magnum opus, Being and Time (published in 1927). Many of the twentieth century's most significant continental thinkers – including Hannah Arendt, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Paul Tillich – acknowledge profound conceptual debts to the insights elaborated in this text. Being and Time was never finished, however, and Heidegger continued to develop, refine, and in some places revolutionize his own thinking for another fifty years. This “later” Heidegger's prolific body of work decisively influenced the next generation of continental philosophers, helping to shape the concepts and concerns of major contemporary figures such as Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Hubert Dreyfus, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Richard Rorty, and Charles Taylor, to name but a few. Despite this unparalleled impact, however, important aspects of Heidegger's later philosophy remain obscured by confusion and controversy. Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education seeks to clarify five interrelated aspects of Heidegger's later thought, namely, his neglected understanding of metaphysics as ontotheology, his controversial critique of technology, his appalling misadventure with Nazism, his prescient critique of the university, and, finally, his important philosophical suggestions for the future of higher education.

Psychoanalysis has been used extensively in film studies from the late 1960s and 1970s onwards. Inspired by Jacques Lacan, the work of Metz and Baudry in France and Mulvey and McCabe in the United Kingdom laid the foundations for film theory that explored the relationship between cinematic systems such as the apparatus and the screen on the one hand and the spectator on the other. The objects of these examinations were exclusively fictional texts. I use psychoanalysis differently through an interrogation of a largely untheorised embodied relationship between the documentary filmmaker and the subject of her or his film from a psychoanalytical perspective. There are many types of documentary film. I focus in this work on films in which a testimony, sometimes dealing with trauma, or an autobiographical account of the other, is gathered by the filmmaker. To this end I work with a number of documentary texts, including my own practice. I look at the potential tensions that these encounters might create between the need to gain as full a disclosure as possible, often fuelled by the filmmaker’s unconscious desire (which may or may not coincide with the consciously stated aim), and the ethical responsibility for the subject of the film. I suggest that a variety of unconscious mechanisms known from clinical psychoanalytical practice might be operating in the process of documentary filmmaking. These unconscious ‘hidden’ factors, notably transference, have a major influence on the decisions made in the creation of the final texts and therefore also have an impact on the future audiences of these films, which is why it is important to bring them to light. The thesis deals also with ethics of the documentary encounter. Apart from mainly Lacanian psychoanalytical thought, I draw on post-Second World War philosophy dealing with the relationship of the ‘I’ to the Other, led by Emmanuel Levinas, but including Althusser, Badiou, Butler, Derrida and others.