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"Dolar, Mladen"
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The Comic Mimesis
Against all odds, there is in Christianity a patron saint of actors, despite the ways in which Christianity has largely regarded acting, and theatre, as a dubious profession, a source of sinful entertainment and questionable virtue. There are condemnations of actors and acting, in most serious terms, from no lesser authorities than Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. But there is an actor who was worthy not only of redemption but also of sanctification. His name is Genesius, and his feast is celebrated on 25 August by the Catholic Church. Here, Dolar discusses how Genesius became worthy of sainthood and the patron saint of acting to whom actors are to commend their soul (if they have one).
Journal Article
Subject Lessons
Responding to the ongoing \"objectal turn\" in contemporary humanities and social sciences, the essays inSubject Lessons present a sustained case for the continued importance- indeed, the indispensability-of the category of the subject for the future of materialist thought. Approaching matters through the frame of Hegel and Lacan, the contributors to this volume, including the editors, as well as Andrew Cole, Mladen Dolar, Nathan Gorelick, Adrian Johnston, Todd McGowan, Borna Radnik, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Kathryn Van Wert, and Alenka Zupancic-many of whom stand at the forefront of contemporary Hegel and Lacan scholarship-agree with neovitalist thinkers that material reality is ontologically incomplete, in a state of perpetual becoming, yet they maintain that this is the case not in spite of but, rather,because of the subject. Incorporating elements of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary and cultural studies,Subject Lessons contests the movement to dismiss the subject, arguing that there can be no truly robust materialism without accounting for the little piece of the Real that is the subject.
eBook
Tyche, clinamen, den
The paper takes as the starting point a dense and notorious quote by Lacan where he takes up in a single gesture three concepts of ancient philosophy,
tyche
,
clinamen
and
den
. The contention is that all three aim at the status of the object, although by different means and in different philosophical contexts, and the paper tries to spell out some crucial points concerning each.
Tyche
, usually translated as chance and put into an opposition with
automaton
, requires a reading of some passages of Aristotle’s
Physics
where Lacan took it from, and an account of the problem of repetition in psychoanalysis.
Clinamen
, the swerve, stemming from Epicure and Lucretius, requires a condensed reading of the tradition which took it up, from Cicero to Hegel, Marx, Deleuze and Badiou, pinpointing the dilemmas and contradictions of this tradition.
Den
, stemming from Democritus who coined this neologism, brings up an entity which is neither being nor nothing, neither one nor zero nor multiple. It is perhaps the best evocation, at the dawn of philosophy, of what Lacan would call object a, and it allows to sidestep the difficulties and the pitfalls presented by the other two notions. The paper tries to pin down the minimal requirement for the Lacanian theory with the irreducible and incommensurable (non)relation of ‘minus one’ and
den
.
Journal Article
The voice as something more : essays toward materiality
In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object.
Using Mladen Dolar's influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More reorients Dolar's psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality.
eBook
Sophist’s Choice
There is a choice to be made about sophistry; the very appearance of the sophist always entails the call for a choice, a decision, and the decision concerns the status of truth. Of course the first obvious choice that comes to mind is the one launched by Plato, and then by Aristotle: there is a choice to be emphatically made between the true philosophy and its counterfeit, between the philosopher and the impostor that is the sophist, the one who is going through the motions of philosophy without espousing its essential tenets, first and foremost the quest for truth, and
Book Chapter
A Voice and Nothing More
A new, philosophically grounded theory of the voice—the voice as the lever of thought, as one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object.
Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: \"You are just a voice and nothing more.\" Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on \"the voice and nothing more\": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work.
The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of \"phonocentrism\" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels—the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice—and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.
eBook
The Not-Two
InThe Not-Two, Lorenzo Chiesa examines the treatment of logic and God in Lacan's later work. Chiesa draws for the most part from Lacan's Seminars of the early 1970s, as they revolve around the axiom \"There is no sexual relationship.\" Chiesa provides both a close reading of Lacan's effort to formalize sexual difference as incompleteness and an assessment of its broader implications for philosophical realism and materialism.
Chiesa argues that \"There is no sexual relationship\" is for Lacan empirically and historically circumscribed by psychoanalysis, yet self-evident in our everyday lives. Lacan believed that we have sex because we love, and that love is a desire to be One in face of the absence of the sexual relationship. Love presupposes a real \"not-two.\" The not-two condenses the idea that our love and sex lives are dictated by the impossibility of fusing man's contradictory being with theheterosof woman as a fundamentally uncountable Other. Sexual liaisons are sustained by a transcendental logic, the so-called phallic function that attempts to overcome this impossibility.
Chiesa also focuses on Lacan's critical dialogue with modern science and formal logic, as well as his dismantling of sexuality as considered by mainstream biological discourse. Developing a new logic of sexuation based on incompleteness requires the relinquishing of any alleged logos of life and any teleological evolution.
For Lacan, the truth of incompleteness as approached psychoanalytically through sexuality would allow us to go further in debunking traditional onto-theology and replace it with a \"para-ontology\" yet to be developed. Given the truth of incompleteness, Chiesa asks, can we think such a truth in itself without turning incompleteness into another truth about truth, that is, into yet another figure of God as absolute being?
eBook
The Trouble with Pleasure
An investigation into the strange and troublesome relationship to pleasure that defines the human being, drawing on the disparate perspectives of Deleuze and Lacan.
Is pleasure a rotten idea, mired in negativity and lack, which should be abandoned in favor of a new concept of desire? Or is desire itself fundamentally a matter of lack, absence, and loss? This is one of the crucial issues dividing the work of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, two of the most formidable figures of postwar French thought. Though the encounter with psychoanalysis deeply marked Deleuze's work, we are yet to have a critical account of the very different postures he adopted toward psychoanalysis, and especially Lacanian theory, throughout his career. In The Trouble with Pleasure, Aaron Schuster tackles this tangled relationship head on. The result is neither a Lacanian reading of Deleuze nor a Deleuzian reading of Lacan but rather a systematic and comparative analysis that identifies concerns common to both thinkers and their ultimately incompatible ways of addressing them. Schuster focuses on drive and desire—the strange, convoluted relationship of human beings to the forces that move them from within—“the trouble with pleasure.\"
Along the way, Schuster offers his own engaging and surprising conceptual analyses and inventive examples. In the “Critique of Pure Complaint” he provides a philosophy of complaining, ranging from Freud's theory of neurosis to Spinoza's intellectual complaint of God and the Deleuzian great complaint. Schuster goes on to elaborate, among other things, a theory of love as “mutually compatible symptoms”; an original philosophical history of pleasure, including a hypothetical Heideggerian treatise and a Platonic theory of true pleasure; and an exploration of the 1920s “literature of the death drive,” including Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, and Blaise Cendrars.
eBook