Author: Joel Whitebook Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9780262731171 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 372
Book Description
In this sweeping challenge to the postmodern critiques of psychoanalysis, Joel Whitebook argues for a reintegration of Freud's uncompromising investigation of the unconscious with the political and philosophical insights of critical theory. Perversion and Utopia follows in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and Paul Ricoeur's Freud and Philosophy. It expands on these books, however, because of the author's remarkable grasp not only of psychoanalytic studies but also of the contemporary critical climate; Whitebook, a philosopher and a psychoanalyst, writes with equal facility on both Habermas and Freud. A central thesis of Perversion and Utopia is that there is an essential affinity between the utopian impulse and the perverse impulse, in that both reflect a desire to bypass the reality principle that Freud claimed to define the human condition. The book explores the positive and negative aspects of the relationship between these impulses, which are ubiquitous features of human life, and the requirements of civilized social existence. Whitebook steers a course between orthodox psychoanalytic conservatism, which seeks simply to repress the perverse-utopian impulse in the name of social continuity and cohesion, and those forms of Freudo-Marxism, postmodernism, and psychoanalytic feminism that advocate its direct and full expression in the name of emancipation. While he demonstrates the limitations of the current textual approaches to Freud, especially those influenced by Lacan, Whitebook also enlists the lessons of psychoanalysis to counteract the excessive rationalism of the Habermasian brand of critical theory, thus making a substantial contribution to current discussions within critical theory itself. His analysis and interpretation of perversion, narcissism, sublimation, and ego bring new insight to these central and thorny issues in Freud, and his discussions of Adorno, Marcuse, Castoriadis, Habermas, Ricoeur, Lacan, and others are equally penetrating.
Author: James Penney Publisher: State University of New York Press ISBN: 0791481670 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 266
Book Description
In The World of Perversion, James Penney argues that antihomophobic criticism has nothing to lose—and indeed everything to gain—by reclaiming the psychoanalytic concept of perversion as psychic structure. Analyzing the antagonism between psychoanalytic approaches to perversion and those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault, Penney explores how different assumptions about sexuality have determined the development of contemporary queer theory, and how the universalizing approach to homosexuality in psychoanalysis actually leads to more useful political strategies for nonheterosexual subjects. Having established this theoretical context, Penney focuses on works by Georges Bataille, Blaise Pascal, Denis Diderot, and Jacques Lacan, tracing the implications of various sexual and moral understandings of the term perversion, and illustrating how a psychoanalytic approach to the question of perversion enables politicized readings that are foreclosed by a Foucauldian methodology.
Author: Jean-François Revel Publisher: Encounter Books ISBN: 1594032645 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 378
Book Description
An English translation of Jean-Francois Revel's 1999 essay in which he examines the response of French intellectuals to the collapse of Soviet communism in the decade after its end.
Author: Samuel Moyn Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674256522 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 346
Book Description
Human rights offer a vision of international justice that today’s idealistic millions hold dear. Yet the very concept on which the movement is based became familiar only a few decades ago when it profoundly reshaped our hopes for an improved humanity. In this pioneering book, Samuel Moyn elevates that extraordinary transformation to center stage and asks what it reveals about the ideal’s troubled present and uncertain future. For some, human rights stretch back to the dawn of Western civilization, the age of the American and French Revolutions, or the post–World War II moment when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was framed. Revisiting these episodes in a dramatic tour of humanity’s moral history, The Last Utopia shows that it was in the decade after 1968 that human rights began to make sense to broad communities of people as the proper cause of justice. Across eastern and western Europe, as well as throughout the United States and Latin America, human rights crystallized in a few short years as social activism and political rhetoric moved it from the hallways of the United Nations to the global forefront. It was on the ruins of earlier political utopias, Moyn argues, that human rights achieved contemporary prominence. The morality of individual rights substituted for the soiled political dreams of revolutionary communism and nationalism as international law became an alternative to popular struggle and bloody violence. But as the ideal of human rights enters into rival political agendas, it requires more vigilance and scrutiny than when it became the watchword of our hopes.
Author: Alan Greenhalgh Publisher: Lulu.com ISBN: 1906801703 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 142
Book Description
This book critically examines the relationship between man and society in Utopian systems. In order to do this, the author reviews a selection of Utopian and dystopian literature. There are excerpts from fiction, philosophy, social and political history, and an appraisal of the relevant issues. Various topics relating to Utopia such as harmony, freedom and its expression, conflict, machines and thought, homosexual rights to marriage, the future of world languages, the function of religion and God, social control and democracy are explored with a view to investigating man's conflict with himself and society. Many of these issues are relevant not only to today but to the 22nd century too. This book provides a thought-provoking addition to the body of literature on the subject.
Author: Walker Percy Publisher: Open Road Media ISBN: 1453216200 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
DIVDIV“A great adventure . . . So outrageous and so real, one is left speechless.” —Chicago Sun Times/divDIV/divDIVIn Walker Percy’s future America, the country is on the brink of disaster. With citizens violently polarized along racial, political, and social lines, and a fifteen-year war still raging abroad, America is crumbling quickly into ruin. The country’s one remaining hope is Dr. Thomas More, whose “lapsometer” is capable of diagnosing the spiritual afflictions—anxiety, depression, alienation—driving everyone’s destructive and disastrous behavior./divDIV /divDIVBut such a potent machine has its pitfalls. As Dr. More soon learns, in the wrong hands, the powerful lapsometer could lead to open warfare, pushing America into anarchy at full-speed./div /div
Author: Simon Jarvis Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 9780415920575 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
This new introduction offers a comprehensive and accessible account of Adorno's work. Jarvis discusses the intellectual and institutional contexts for Adorno's thought and, in a broad-ranging study, examines his contributions to social theory, cultural theory, aesthetics, and philosophy. He shows how a re-examination of Adorno's work from the perspective of classical German philosophy allows us to see him from a new and illuminating angle, and ultimately to achieve a fuller understanding of all his thought.
Author: Susan Best Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472525752 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
By offering a new way of thinking about the role of politically engaged art, Susan Best opens up a new aesthetic field: reparative aesthetics. The book identifies an innovative aesthetic on the part of women photographers from the southern hemisphere, who against the dominant modes of criticality in political art, look at how cultural production can be reparative. The winner of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand best book award in 2017, Reparative Aesthetics contributes an entirely new theory to the interdisciplinary fields of aesthetics, affect studies, feminist theory, politics and photography. Conceptually innovative and fiercely original this book will move us beyond old political and cultural stalemates and into new terrain for analysis and reflection.
Author: David Greenham Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 9780739110621 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 220
Book Description
The first book-length study of Norman O. Brown, The Resurrection of the Body brings an order beyond "Western Culture" to the subjects that make up Brown's field of engagement, subjects as diverse as Classical Studies, Philosophy, Philology, Psychoanalysis, Theology, Literature, History, and Marxism. For Brown, each of these subjects is in a very real sense an emanation of the body; that is, Western Culture is the body's attempt to resurrect itself. Examining Brown's works from Hermes the Thief to Closing Time, David Greenham illuminates Brown's fascinating signature style of collage, quotation, and comment. This book also seeks to redress the balance between Brown and his more celebrated contemporary Herbert Marcuse. The Resurrection of the Body is essential reading for any Norman O. Brown scholar.
Author: Pauline Johnson Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1134209274 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
If we are to believe what many sociologists are telling us, the public sphere is in a near terminal state. Our ability to build solidarities with strangers and to agree on the general significance of needs and problems seems to be collapsing. These cultural potentials appear endangered by a newly aggressive attempt to universalize and extend the norms of the market. For four decades Habermas has been trying to bring the claims of a modern public sphere before us. His vast oeuvre has investigated its historical, sociological and theoretical preconditions, has explored its relevance and meaning as well as diagnosing its on-going crises. In the contemporary climate, a systematic look at Habermas’ lifelong project of rescuing the modern public sphere seems an urgent task. This study reconstructs major developments in Habermas’ thinking about the public sphere, and is a contribution to the current vigorous debate over its plight. It marshals the significance of Habermas’ lifetime of work on this topic to illuminate what is at stake in a contemporary interest in rescuing an embattled modern public sphere. Habermas’ project of rescuing the neglected potentials of Enlightenment legacies has been deeply controversial. For many, it is too lacking in radical commitments to warrant its claim to a contemporary place within a critical theory tradition. Against this developing consensus, Pauline Johnson describes Habermas’ project as one that is still informed by utopian energies, even though his own construction of emancipatory hopes itself proves to be too narrow and one-sided.
Author: Joel Whitebook
Author: James Penney
Author: Jean-François Revel
Author: Samuel Moyn
Author: Alan Greenhalgh
Author: Walker Percy
Author: Simon Jarvis
Author: Susan Best
Author: David Greenham
Author: Pauline Johnson