Anglo-American Reception Research Articles

Translating Nietzsche's Atheism(s)

The paper will examine Kaufmann’s translation of Genealogy of Morals (GM), specifically a section of GM III §27, where the translator’s choice of a single word skews an important insight of Nietzsche’s on the question of modern atheism. Kaufmann’s influential translation, highly regarded for its stylistic refinement, has served as the starting point for most English translations that followed, and so his rendering of this section continues to impact the current Anglo-American reception of Nietzsche’s work. By challenging Kaufmann’s rendering of an important section of GM III §27, the paper will extrapolate a more nuanced understanding of atheism from Nietzsche’s position. This awareness problematizes current attempts to equate Nietzsche with a scientific naturalist program.

Analiza fragmenta: književnost, histerija, biseksualnost

A b s t r a c t AN ANALYSIS OF FRAGMENT: LITERATURE, HYSTERIA, BISEXUALITY The essay starts with Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, relating its discordant lines of argumentation with the psychoanalytic concept of (bi)sexuality, as it was developed from Studies on Hysteria to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the latter of which was published in same year as the “Dora case”. We consider the aspects in which Freud’s contradictory analysis of the case becomes central to the feminist debate on hysteria in Hélène Cixous’s and Catherine Clément’s classic The Newly Born Woman. The analysis points to the constitutive relation of the authors’ disagreement on hysteria and different conceptions of literature and politics presented in their study and the subsequent polemical discussions. We further approach the dissent about the political and methodological framework of feminist criticism in the Anglo-American reception of the French authors, wherein gynocritics Elaine Showalter and Sandra M. Gilbert renounce the question of hysteria. Alternatively, deconstructive critical reading by Peggy Kamuf is grounded in Derrida’s approach to literature. Kamuf traces the main misunderstandings in Cixous’s reception, by interpreting her oeuvre as emblematic of so-called semi-theory and semi-politics, trying to deconstruct oppositions between a theoretical, political, and poetical text. Through the lens of semi-theory, the relation between Cixous’s semi-concept of a woman, as a reference without a referent, and the psychoanalytic understanding of bisexuality and hysteria, has far-reaching consequences on the reading of psychoanalytic text as literary and hysterical, as it compulsively repeats the very fragmentary pattern it tries to interpret. Keywords: hysteria, literature, feminist criticism, bisexuality, politics

What is Existential Educational Encounter?

This paper aims to clarify the meaning of the pedagogical concept of encounter by providing an overview of its use from the historical foundations of the concept in Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s (1903 to 1991) philosophy to contemporary phenomenological readings by Maxine Greene, Donald Vandenberg and Robyn Harrison. The outcome is a critical analysis and evaluation of the significance of the concept in educational contexts. The aims of the paper are as follows: a) to articulate the educational significance of the concept of encounter, and b) to clarify its relationship to the humanistic concept of formation (or unfolding; Bildung), in order to establish the tension between Bildung-theory and the existential theory of human formation. The paper claims that, for a more elaborated understanding of the human educative process, the tension between the processes of encounter and Bildung should be seen as the core tension behind the holistic view of becoming human. Also, c) for an analysis of the Anglo-American reception of the concept, a phenomenological view of the encounter as a transcendental aspect of a learning process will be made in order to gain a wider view of the concept.

Lacanian literary criticism and the topological unconscious

ABSTRACTThis essay challenges a certain trend in the Anglo-American reception of Lacan – namely, the tendency to either explicitly or implicitly section off his work on the literary from his attempts to present, in a non-metaphorical fashion, the mathematised structure of the psychoanalytic subject. It is, I argue, only when proper account is taken of Lacan’s topologisation of the unconscious that the precise nature of Lacan’s reading methodology – offered as an alternative to ‘applied psychoanalysis’ – becomes clear. The essay begins by noting the choice Lacan made in the 1970s to align the unconscious not with the symbolic (language and law) but with the real and outlines why the latter concept is best presented as a topological ex-sistence. Following an examination of the two topological qualities that define the psychoanalytic subject (the unlocalisable twist and the irreducible hole), the essay concludes with an explanation of the dense arguments proffered in two little read écrits on the subject of psychoanalytic literary criticism (‘Lituraterre’ and ‘Preface to the Work of Robert Georgin’) and articulates why the relation between the unconscious and literature is not akin to that between cause and effect but instead concerns a shared structural real.

Modified Universalisms & the Role of Local Legal Culture in the Making of Cross-Border Insolvency Law

Cross-border insolvency law scholars have devoted much attention to theoretical questions of international system design. There is a general consensus in the literature that the ideal system would be a universalist system in which cross-border insolvencies would be administered in a single forum under a single governing law But scholars have paid less systematic attention to how a universalist system can be implemented in the real world by institutional actors such as legislatures and judges. This article seeks to redress the balance by discussing the reception of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency in the United States and the United Kingdom and exploring the role that judges play in harmonizing cross-border insolvency law. As the Model Law is choice-of-law neutral, domestic enactments typically contain no express choice-of-law rules. Universalists urge judges to take their cue from modified universalism and interpret Model Law enactments in a manner that approximates to universalism’s ideal “one court, one law” approach. But comparative analysis of Anglo-American judicial practice reveals that the contours of modified universalism are contested. “Modified universalism” as it is understood in the United States implies that judges should presumptively defer to the law of the foreign insolvency proceeding (lex concursus). American universalists tend therefore to favor a strong, centralizing version of modified universalism. By contrast, British modified universalism has a forum law (lex fori) choice-of-law orientation. British modified universalism supports effective coordination of insolvency proceedings with one court having a primary coordinating role. But it lacks any commitment to a centralizing lex concursus rule in the absence of statutory mandate. Framed by reference to this account of the Model Law’s Anglo-American reception, the article argues that modified universalism offers no convincing theory of how a universalist system is to be institutionalized in practice in the absence of more and harder law, the province of legislatures. Competing versions of modified universalism cannot support an interpretive methodology capable of yielding global judge-made rules of private international law that would address the Model Law’s choice-of-law indeterminacy.

Coals to Newcastle? On the Anglo-American Reception of Pierre Rosanvallon

Abstract This essay assesses the reasons for the so far minimal reception of Pierre Rosanvallon’s writings in the English-speaking world. Some of the factors suggested include his resistance to a liberal triumphalism that framed the Anglo-American presentation of the larger body of thought to which he contributed and his focus on hexagonal French history, especially in the nineteenth century. The essay closes with a comparison of the reception of his approach with that of Thomas Piketty’s recent bestseller on a similar topic. Keywords: Pierre Rosanvallon, Claude Lefort, Mark Lilla, liberalism, democracy ----- Bibliographie: Moyn, Samuel: Coals to Newcastle? On the Anglo-American Reception of Pierre Rosanvallon, ZPTh, 1-2016, S. 7-16. https://doi.org/10.3224/zpth.v7i1.03

Book review: Ceti medi senza futuro? Scritti, appunti sul lavoro e altro, written by Sergio Bologna Book review: Vita da freelance. I lavoratori della conoscenza e il loro futuro, written by Sergio Bologna and Dario Banfi Book review: Felici e sfruttati. Capitalismo digitale ed eclissi del lavoro, written by Carlo Formenti

This paper reviews the recent writing of Sergio Bologna and Carlo Formenti. These authors are proposed as post-workerist dissenters with respect to Hardt and Negri’s conceptualisation of contemporary capitalism. Therefore, while the latter has risen to prominence within Anglo-American academia astheradical (post-workerist) account of the political economy of the knowledge economy, the work of Bologna and Formenti is here presented as providing alternative accounts of contemporary capitalism and its dynamics. In doing so, this work challenges the Anglo-American reception of post-operaismo. However, these analyses are also assessed by showing the many similarities they share with Hardt and Negri’s account (not least with respect to the category of class composition). These similarities are argued to pose immanent limits, impeding this post-workerist dissent’s ability to carryoperaismobeyond Hardt and Negri.

RETHINKING RUSSOLO

One of the more telling indicators of Luigi Russolo's (1885–1947) Anglo-American reception is his description in Grove as an ‘Italian inventor, painter and composer’. Within this lurks the devaluation of his composing efforts in comparison to his work as the maker of intonarumori (noise instruments), his authoring of new aesthetic ideas, and his activities as a painter. There is little, perhaps, to argue with in this assessment, for (somewhat ironically) Russolo's music of the future has been consigned irrevocably to the music of the past; Raymond Fearn has suggested that ‘the musical remnants from this period have remained to a large extent in the realm of musical archaeology’. The only material traces available for musical archaeologists are the opening seven bars of the score of Il risveglio di una città (The Awakening of the City; 1913–14): the machines that were to play it were destroyed during the Second World War. The loss of Russolo's compositions has inevitably distorted our understanding of his work and has served to throw attention onto those progressive, and sometimes speculative, theoretical and mechanical aspects of it that have survived in written accounts, at the expense of those elements that are of a more traditional or pragmatic nature. Study of the remaining fragments of Il risveglio di una città, leavened with necessary doses of circumspection and speculation, forms a vital and hitherto under-utilized component to any assessment of Russolo's career.

The Magic Center: Matrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu

The Magic CenterMatrix and Conception in Derrida's La structure, le signe et le jeu John W P Phillips (bio) Le centre n’est pas le centre (Jacques Derrida)1 “Structure, Sign and Play” plays a transitional role in Jacques Derrida’s career, not only introducing him to the notoriety of an ambivalent Anglo-American reception, but also mobilizing the role of transition in the philosophical oeuvre, alerting an academic community to powerful resources for epistemological, ethical and political engagement inherent but not always acknowledged as such in Western thought. In “Structure” the situation is staged by its posing a series of paradoxical formulations involving the dissolution of false alternatives—structure and event, signifier and signified, culture and nature, science and myth, etc.— culminating in the opposition of two interpretations of interpretation, two kinds of play, and looking forward to the coming birth of a monstrous form. This movement of “de-construction” follows a cyclic and interminable pattern, a syntax that each time generates concepts (elemental or atomic units of signification) on the basis of either the positive determination of being as presence, or of its negative in the determination of an absence that generates infinite substitutions. Derrida’s text inhabits these discourses of destruction as their often obscure trace, enough to allow to emerge an alternative syntax, that of the trace itself. The trace, the division into a “before” and “after” that divides the element a priori, forms the basis—a theoretical quasi-matrix that has continued to flourish for more than forty years—for the production of supposedly incalculable events. In this article I propose a sober analysis of the matrix and its trace. 1966: Deconstruction and Deconstruction Eh Sade, encore an effort! Car il y a déconstruction et déconstruction. (Derrida: 2000, 74)2 The structure of the sign (signifier/signified), in repetition of the structure of the logos (word/idea), condenses in a single unit a complex network of metaphysical problems. Structuralist investigations into the sign, which intend to expose the syntactical rules that govern its generation, promise to explicate a medium for profound critique of philosophical, literary and scientific domains. Pivotal moments of the onto-theological tradition can be reconsidered as versions (each time differing immensely in other ways) of the distinction between sensible image and invisible sense: all symbolize the search for truth in the self-presence of signified sense.3 Against this, attacks on metaphysics throughout its history, by sophists, skeptics and empiricists, and more recently the deconstructive movements of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and others, are concerned to show that the ideal univocity of the signified is a myth, and that all signified meaning must emerge originally from the opaque and enigmatic domain of the signifier. Two problems emerge: first, the sign in its bivalent structure does not in fact allow anybody to bring about the downfall of metaphysics, because at best it can only repeat the previous structure; so second, the work of rereading traditional texts is required to mobilize old resources in this new light. Metaphysics, if it does indeed operate within and around the same structure as that of the sign, might already be more sophisticated in its investigations than either structuralist science or poststructuralist play has yet been able to comprehend. Derrida’s work of the time can be read today as the culmination of the development of a subtle yet serious form of disagreement in relation to contemporary thought. As things stand the relation to truth has become a relation to interpretation, in which the problem of knowledge emerges as a problem of the limits of language, which itself can be comprehended in one of two possible ways: under the sign of the signified and animated by a truth function, a platitude that makes possible events of correspondence; or under the sign of the signifier, in which there is no truth but the relation to other signifiers and the endless possibility of their substitution and mutation. At its most radical “there is no truth” means a complete redefinition of truth so that, for truth as correspondence, or adequatio, we now substitute truth as unconcealing, or alētheia, a kind of concealment in which an originating uncovering...

Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers. By A lan D. S chrift . Oxford, Blackwell, 2006. xxvi+300 pp. Hb £50.00. Pb £17.99.

This volume gives a broad overview of the history of philosophy in France over the last century and does so with the ambition of correcting much received wisdom as to the general character and trajectory of its development. In particular, Schrift's aim is to correct what he sees as a widespread misconception, namely that French philosophy in the twentieth century really begins with Existentialism and that it functions more or less exclusively as a response to four German master thinkers: Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche and Hegel. To this end, Schrift pays particular attention in his account to areas which, he argues, have hitherto been ignored by many anglophone scholars working in the area of ‘continental’ or French philosophy. These include those specifically indigenous aspects of the French philosophical tradition which cannot be explained in terms of an appropriation of German thought, for instance, the inheritance from the nineteenth century of the two contrasting schools of spiritualism and positivism. The role played by French academic institutions also provides a central focus for Schrift's account. This double emphasis on the indigenous tradition and on the academic institutions of France shapes the book as a whole. It provides a key focus for the eighty page critical and narrative account of twentieth-century French philosophy itself, and informs the second, longer section, which gives brief biographies of a wide range of philosophers. Whilst the main narrative section and each of the individual biographies are relatively short, the emphasis placed on the network of institutional influences and inheritances which have shaped the careers of individual philosophers sheds valuable light on development of modern French thought as a whole. These two sections are supplemented by two helpful appendices, the first giving a detailed account of French academic institutions and their culture, the second an extensive bibliography of French philosophical works in English translation. Schrift's book is an important contribution to recent evaluations of modern French philosophy. His account of the role played by positivism, idealism and spiritualism in the early part of the century complements that given by Gary Gutting in French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (see FS, lvii (2003), 105), and provides the historical context against which many later developments in French thought need to be understood. In particular, Schrift gives an important account of philosophical developments within French academic philosophy which occurred during the period when Sartrian Existentialism appeared to reign supreme within wider intellectual culture. The importance of the epistemological tradition represented by key figures such as Bachelard, Cavaillès and Canguilhem, although ignored or marginalised in much Anglo-American reception, is given full recognition here. This, in turn, allows Schrift to mark key genealogical links between phenomenology and structuralism which are often obscured in those histories which emphasise the role played by structuralism in overturning the hegemony enjoyed by existential phenomenology in the post-war period.

Zulfikar Ghose's The Triple Mirror of the Self and Cosmopolitan Authentication

Zulfikar Ghose's critical reception has focused on the relationship between authorial biography and authenticity. The Triple Mirror of the Self (1992) refracts this focus, and can be read as the author's interested response to his own exclusion from emerging canons of postcolonial literature. The novel depicts the relationship between postcolonial textual production and Anglo-American reception in a way that emphasizes how its parameters exclude Ghose's own works. It then stages the author's rejection of the expectation that he will act as an interpreter of an authenticated location related to the place of his birth.

“Thinking Strictly Prohibited”: Music, Language, and Thought in “Sirens”

Taking their cue from novelist's comments to Frank Budgen that he composed Sirens using the technical resources of (Ellmann 459), many theorist-critics have written about in Joyce. These writers locate in feeling and sensuality a resistance to incursions of a rationality they identify as, among other things, aggressive and abstract to point of being barren. Viewing thought as enemy, they seek to purge this oppressive spirit with supposedly nonrational matter they would thereby free. As a consequence, discussions initially concerned with something like Joyce's prosody quickly tend to focus on political and philosophical questions, particularly those associated with desire. (1) The deadly prose of mind, argument goes, is countered by poetic or body. In what follows, I consider idea of musical language in Sirens episode of Ulysses, not in order to cloak a tangential discussion of body, porous self, or textual subversion, but to think through significance of resemblance between music and language and to identify why critics have found it almost impossible keep this topic in view. (2) It is my contention that rather than rout critical intelligence, musicality in Ulysses allows readers to experience one of music's most striking effects--distraction. With help of Theodor Adorno's aesthetics, particularly Music and Language: A Fragment, I address question of standoff between art (defined as seduction, destruction, and falsehood) and reason (constructed as disinterestedness, preservation, and truth). I argue that musical mimesis does not just undermine thinking but is a kind of thinking itself. In this way I hope to restore to Sirens a cognitive content overlooked by much of Joyce criticism that takes sensuality to be adversary of a reason it consistently posits as wicked. I propose that very separation of art (mimesis/sensuality) and philosophy (cognition/identification) produces undesirable--that is, crude, distorting, and damaging--aspects of reason that poststructuralist and historicist critics contest. (3) However, it is not my goal to diminish importance of mimetic element in art. Neither subsuming art beneath (Adorno's) philosophy nor dismissing it as mere decoration, I consider political implications of Joyce's mediation of rational through sensual, sensual through rational. Derek Attridge takes Joyce's experiments with syntax in Sirens as music making in a literal sense. But emptying idea of musicality into post-Saussurean model of language to which he is committed, Attridge soon gets distracted from question of music that motivates his discussion. He argues that by reviving dormant prosody of prose, fearless of both unintelligibility and a short-circuiting of information transfer, Joyce liberates body from a dictatorial and englobing will, and allows its organs their own energies and proclivities (61). The study of musicality falls by wayside as classical poststructuralist concerns such as a thematics of breached subject take center stage. Attridge's observations about language and rampant autonomy of fetishised body parts in Sirens are extremely provocative, and represent a major contribution to literature on Ulysses. Nevertheless, his analysis of body soon also forgets its linguistic ground (a ground that he reminds us is long forgetful of its musical impulse) and develops into a sketch of a progressive politics driven by liberated sexuality. The release of body from tyranny of mind, Attridge claims, unleashes against repressive morality. Its utopian politics are not only problem with this approach. When Attridge actually describes sexuality, he reveals a major weakness with Anglo-American reception of French theory, or perhaps with theory itself: sexuality thrives on separation of body into separate parts, while a sexually repressive morality insists on wholeness and singleness of body and mind (or soul) (62). …

Freedom, Naming, Nobility: The Convergence of Rhetorical and Political Theory in Nietzsche's Philosophy

Philosophers political scientists alike have habitually overlooked Friedrich Nietzsche's contributions to modern political theory, the sum of which constitutes a remarkably original alternative to the conventional precepts of both liberalism democracy. Few of the discussions of Nietzsche's politics are long, Bruce Detwiler writes, and those are (with some notable recent exceptions) tend to be of low quality, often inspired more by the political passions of the day than by any commitment to dispassionate analysis of the subject at hand (1990, 1). The Third Reich's enthusiastic appropriation of Nietzsche's philosophy, the pall it cast over his subsequent reputation, explains much about why scholars for decades shied away from validating his distinctive contributions to modern political philosophy. Even Nietzsche's intellectual redeemers, however, complicated matters in this regard. Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche's esteemed biographer translator, rescued his subject from historical political disrepute by maintaining, in Keith Ansell-Pearson's summation, that Nietzsche was not a political thinker at all, but someone who was mainly concerned with the fate of the solitary, isolated individual removed from the cares concerns of the social world (1994, l).1 During the 1970s 1980s, French poststructuralist philosophers challenged Kaufmann 's standard interpretation of Nietzsche by pursuing the broad implications of Nietzsche's insights on language. Such insights scandalized longstanding beliefs in the priority of truth reason over linguistic artifice thus amounted to a withering critique of the very foundations of Western metaphysics rational empiricism.2 The resultant Anglo-American reception of this so-called new Nietzsche, which lionized his contributions to modern views of language, truth, aesthetics, nonetheless replicated Kaufmann's tendency to underestimate Nietzsche's uniquely valuable political insights.3 Owing to these receptions of Nietzsche's thought, modern commentators have frequently dismissed his political philosophy for its alleged naivete

Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism

There is currently a backlash against modernism in English-language music studies. While this vogue of ‘modernism bashing’ is ostensibly based on progressive ideologies, it is dependent on a one-sided perception of musical modernism which it shares with earlier conservative disparagements. Of central importance in this respect is the ‘othering’ of musical modernism as an essentially continental European phenomenon in the ‘Anglosphere’, where it is consistently suspected of being a ‘foreign import’ – by conservative commentators in the first part of the twentieth century, just as by their ‘new-musicological’ successors at the turn of the twenty-first.The example of the Anglo-American reception of the so-called Darmstadt school, usually regarded as quintessentially modernist, demonstrates how certain partial understandings and downright prejudices are handed down. For instance, the critical commonplace of Darmstadt’s presumed obsession with such values as technical innovation, structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition says more about those who coined it – mostly American critics who were uncomfortable with the aesthetic as well as the political radicalism of Darmstadt – than about the music itself. It is often precisely this depoliticized, sanitized construction of modernism that present-day critics have attacked, apparently unaware that this has always been a misrepresentation. By thus tracing some common misapprehensions in the Anglo-American reception of musical modernism, I want to argue for a fuller recognition of modernism’s essentially dialectical nature.

Sexuality's Failure: The Birth of History

Sexuality’s Failure: The Birth of History Jason B. Jones Review of: Tim Dean, Beyond Sexuality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Charles Shepherdson, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 2000. In an interview familiar to English readers, “The Confession of the Flesh,” there is a terse exchange between Michel Foucault and Jacques-Alain Miller over the former’s history of sexuality. Miller doggedly insists that “There isn’t a history of sexuality in the way that there is a history of bread” (213). Foucault replies by likening the history of sexuality to that of madness, and the interview takes a different turn.1 It is a pity that Miller and Foucault should have allowed this particular point to drop, for it reveals the central conflict between psychoanalysis and the historicism exemplified by Foucault: psychoanalysis, specifically its Lacanian inflections, contends that historicism misrecognizes sexuality by turning it into an effect of discourse.2 This conflict has wide-ranging repercussions, touching on fundamental questions of identity, sexuality, power, representation, and the nature of history and historical change. The year 2000 saw the publication of eagerly awaited collections by two of the most invigorating and provocative writers on psychoanalysis and historicism: Tim Dean’s Beyond Sexuality and Charles Shepherdson’s Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. Dean and Shepherdson begin their books with statements of the same goal: to recapture the “theoretical specificity of Lacanian theory” in the face of an Anglo-American reception that has tended either to assimilate psychoanalysis with Foucault or to dismiss it as either essentialist and ahistorical, on the one hand, or as reducing everything to language, on the other (Shepherdson 8; for similar statements from Dean see 8, 15, and 22). One great merit of Beyond Sexuality and Vital Signs is the way they move debates over sexuality and identity beyond facile, sterile arguments between essentialism and constructionism—an opposition, Shepherdson points out, that plays out in postmodern clothes the nineteenth-century, and thus basically pre-Freudian, opposition between Geisteswissenschaften and Naturewissenschaften (15, 183). Dean and Shepherdson start from the same place: the Lacanian proposition, derived from Freud, that sexuality represents a failure of identity constitutes the sharpest insight of psychoanalysis, one with ramifications that are still far from being understood. The Lacanian argument is profoundly antipsychological and anti-commonsensical, as Dean observes: “human sexuality involves persons only contingently.... We misconstrue sexuality’s functioning when we begin our analysis of it from the point of view of men and women, rather than from the perspective of language and its effects” (18). Shepherdson explains that, because Freud’s theory of sexuality binds the drives to representation, psychoanalysis fundamentally conceives of a sexuality constitutively opposed to nature, reproduction, or any other telos. In Dean’s lovely expression, “Language and the body are permanently out of synch, though not always in the same way” (59). In addition to this attention to sexuality’s failure, the two books share other emphases, such as clarifying the differences between the Imaginary and the Symbolic (including between the image and the word), and most notably a sustained engagement with Catherine Millot’s work on transsexuality.3 As a consequence of their attempt to bring psychoanalysis into sharper relief, both writers are also somewhat polemical, digging through the reception history of Lacanian psychoanalysis and what is usually called French feminism in order to demonstrate how and why certain concepts have been obscured—or simply not understood. Despite their common interest in clarifying the theoretical stakes of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Dean and Shepherdson also have significantly divergent interests and methods. Dean’s Beyond Sexuality offers a radical rethinking of sexuality on impersonalist grounds, revealing the value of Lacan’s conception of the objet a to queer theory—and, splendidly, the extent to which the objet a deserves to supplant the phallus in Lacanian theory. Dean eloquently demonstrates the vitality of heterodox—or, perhaps more precisely, of original, non-acolytic—readings of Lacan, as well as the crucial importance of Lacanian analysis for social phenomena such as safe-sex education. Shepherdson’s disentangling of the three elements of his subtitle—nature, culture, psychoanalysis—works to defamiliarize French feminists such as Irigaray, Kristeva, Lemoine-Luccioni, and Millot...

Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (review)

Charles Shepherdson's lucid and erudite book, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis, makes four crucial contributions to contemporary debates in feminism and psychoanalysis. First, it underscores the originality of the psycho-analytical concepts of embodiment and sexuality irreducible either to biological essentialism or its opposite, the cultural construction of the body. Second, it discusses the relation between psychoanalysis and history that is distinct from both structuralism and historicism in its old and new incarnations. Third, by clarifying the specificity of psychoanalytical categories—the specificity that has often been lost in the Anglo-American reception of Jacques Lacan's work—it enables a different interpretation of the complex relation between Lacan and other influential French thinkers like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Michel Foucault. In particular, Shepherdson intervenes into the reception of French feminism and addresses the difficulties generated by the mistranslation of sexual difference into sex/gender divide. And finally, Vital Signs introduces the work of the psychoanalytical writers lesser known in the United States such as Catherine Millot and Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni.

Correlations, constellations and the Truth

The Anglo-American reception of Adorno has secularized his thought and thus missed its normative basis. In this article, the ‘constellation’, a central feature of Adorno's philosophy, is traced to Hermann Cohen's anti-immanentist notion of ‘Korrelation’ and to Benjamin's attempt to discover a radically Kantian and adamantly Jewish ontology and concept of the truth. Adorno's works are shown to limn a critical measure for being and for reason, based on a very un-Hegelian refusal of immanence and on a commitment to a regulative, if not constative, principle of redemption.

Existence and the communicatively competent self

Most readers of Habermas would not classify him as an existential thinker. The view of Habermas as a philosopher in German Idealist and Critical traditions from Kant to Hegel and Marx to the Frankfurt School prevails among Continental as much as among analytic philosophers. And the mainstream Anglo-American reception of his work and politics is shaped by the approaches of formal analysis rather than those of existential and social phenomenology or even current American pragmatism. One may argue that both these readings eclipse richer existential dimensions of a thinker who challenges the notorious methodological and political splits among analytic, Continental and pragmatist orientations. I argue that Habermas’ critical relation to Heidegger’s a historical history of Being and his misguided political career cannot explain a competing narrative of his own affirmative appropriation of existential-ethical dimensions of thought and activism. Second, if one sets in the foreground this competing narrative, there emerges a weak thesis, whether or not a plausible complementarity between the communications critical social theory and concrete existential categories can be established. Third, one may inquire further into a stronger thesis whether or not this link must be developed in order to render Habermas’ own theory of a communicatively competent self sufficiently concrete and critical.

For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility

Fresh scholarship has finally begun to displace the longstanding misreading of Adorno in the Anglo-American reception of the Frankfurt School.' Adorno's position on popular culture most often presented in the context of the polemical exchanges with Walter Benjaminhas generally been characterized as a myopic mandarinism blind to the utopian and progressive dimensions of mass media such as film. This black-and-white juxtaposition of Adorno and Benjamin while perhaps valuable as a reductive pedagogical device for presenting an historical debate on aesthetics and politics depends in large measure on somewhat hasty readings of Adorno's essays on popular music and jazz,2 and of the