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In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions-whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media-have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family-and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Levi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy.The Law of Kinshipcontributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.

In this dialogue, Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical \"masters,\" Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Élisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death -- critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work. Their exchange reinvigorates how the the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker is perceived.

\"Examines how French policy makers have called upon structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis (specifically, the works of Claude Lâevi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan) to reassert the centrality of sexual difference as the foundation for all social and psychic organization\"--Author's Web site.

The quickly changing character of the global environment has predicated a number of crises in the sciences of biology and ecology. Specifically, the rapid rate of ecological change has led to the proliferation of novel ecologies. These unprecedented ecosystems and assemblages challenge the scientific, as well as cultural, core of many disciplines. This has led to divisive debates over what constitutes a 'natural' system state, and over what kinds of interventions, if any, should be advocated by scientists. In this paper, we review the nature of the recent discomfort, conflict, and ambivalence experienced in some sciences. In examining these, we stress emerging and conjoined concerns in ecological scientific communities. Specifically, we identify, on the one hand, an expressed concern that practitioners have been insufficiently persistent and explicit in proselytizing the current risks of human impacts, and on the other hand an obverse concern that many historically common scientific concepts and concerns (like 'invasive' species) are already overly normative and culturally freighted. We identify the resulting contradictory condition as 'ecological anxiety disorder', announced either as a fearful response to: 1) the negative normative influence of humans on the earth (anthrophobia) or 2) the inherent influence of normative human values within one's own science (autophobia). We then argue, drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, that these paralyzing phobias are born of an inability to address more fundamental anxieties. Only by explicitly enunciating the object of scientific desire, we argue, as Lacan suggests, can scientific practitioners come to terms with these anxieties in a way that does not lead to dysfunction. Using a case example of island rewilding in the Indian Ocean, we provide an alternative mode of resolving and adjudicating human influences and normative aspects in ecology and biology, one that is explicitly political.

[...]of Winnicott's (1935) \"Manic Defense\" membership paper for the British Society, as well as his (1936) paper, \"Appetite and Emotional Disorder,\" Robinson (2016, CW, 1:14) writes: \"Both speak of Klein's influence, but both also show signs of Winnicott beginning to find his own way in working out the relation of the environment to internal world in the first stages of what Abram (2008, 1194) has termed his 'environmental individual set-up.' [...]while he frontally critiqued Klein for allowing a slavishness of what he termed \"internal object clichés\" to be bandied about, he took a more instructive tone with other Kleinians-for instance, Money-Kyrle, to whom he tried to explain his emphasis on the environmental factor; or his avuncular tone with Wilfred Bion, whom he thought as early as 1951, (in a newly published letter, CW: 3, 433-445) could accomplish great things and make significant contributions, so long as he could overcome the Klein group's insularity. [...]Winnicott's subtle and varied approach to his various Kleinian colleagues might assure us that these Collected Works will provide analysts and scholars of the history of our discipline bountiful material for years to come.

\"What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.\"--John Milbank\"To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.\"--Slavoj ŽižekIn this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, \"Radical Orthodox\" theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event--God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with \"paradox.\" The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Žižek and Milbank.

At the center of her tetralogy, Elena Ferrante stages the manifold issues of female friendship and identity formation, of self-actualization and self-annihilation. The story of Lila and Lena, girls turned women in postwar Naples, unfolds against the claustrophobic and violent sociocultural context of a peripheral rione. Reading through the lenses of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and feminist philosophy, our essay provides some theoretical and interpretive coordinates, focusing in particular on the first, eponymous volume (2011). Starting with the Derridean notion of \"trace\" which radically problematizes the very act of writing an (auto)biography, our reflection is then triggered by Lacan's account of the mirror stage and its role in the construction of the self through specular relations. Finally, relying on Cavarero's and Butler's insights, we read the symbolic sisterhood between the two girls and their envisioning of an utopian \"city with love\" as a possible political model of reciprocal exchange and ethical bonding.

The aim of this is to retain the lessons learned from post-structuralist reading practice even in a specific historical context, instead of merely throwing the baby of close reading out with the bathwater of poststructuralist aporias (as have some \"culturalist\" views).5 Recent scholarship has repeatedly pointed to the role of the Slavic East in Freud's formation. [...]Timothy Beasley-Murray argues on the basis of Freud's Czech childhood and nanny for \"the curious role that the Slav plays as a symbol of the repressed in Freud's own biography and work,\" and generalizes from this that \"[f]or Freud, the Slavonic represents the repressed within German-language culture: an element of the alien within the familiar that Freud's theory seeks to domesticate. \"8 One of the great merits of Rice's work is its discussion of not only the thematic links between the two works, but also their structural and generic ones. [...]Freud's work immediately after The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and Its Discontents, not only continues many of the same arguments, it also is still in dialogue with Russia and Dostoyevsky. [...]the famous section of Civilization where Freud rejects the idea of neighbor-love—a passage since commented on by Lacan, Reinhard, and others—may itself be seen as a rejection of a specifically Eastern or Russian idea. Freud's Dostoyevsky essay has received relatively little critical attention perhaps due to its author's own half-heartedness in writing it (it was a commissioned piece in which Freud himself seemed to be only faintly interested), as also with its own structural irregularity, ending with a discussion of a Stefan Zweig novella and not of Dostoyevsky. [...]questions of literary art are dismissed with a cursoriness unusual even for Freud right near the essay's beginning.