Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Science and the Real
Psychoanalytical Notebooks 27
New Issue, Out Now
Order it online at
Guest editor: Miquel Bassols
CONTENTS
Jacques-Alain Miller – “Psychoanalysis, its place
among the sciences”
Miquel Bassols – “There is no science of the real”
Eric Laurent – “The illusion of scientism, the
anguish of scientists”
Marco Focchi – “Number in science and in psychoanalysis”
Pierre Skriabine – “Science, the subject and
psychoanalysis”
Philippe La Sagna et al. – “Science and the name of the father”
Esthela Solano-Suarez – “The clinic in the time of
the real”
Francois Ansermet – “Trace and object, between neurosciences and psychoanalysis”
Guy Briole – “Error and misunderstanding”
Alfredo Zenoni – “A post-scientific real”
Jacques-Alain Miller – “Spare parts”
Pierre Naveau – “Jealousy and the hidden gaze”
Veronique Voruz – “Reading Catherine M. on jealousy”
Bogdan Wolf – “Intricacies of the gaze”
Betty Bertrand-Godfrey – “Jealousy as a name of the
father?”
Laure Naveau – “The other man of his life “
Holly Pester – “I have spoilt a better name than my
own…”
New NSA Revelations
[...]
Jeremy Scahill, a
contributor to The Nation magazine and the New York Times best-selling author
of "Dirty Wars," said he will be working with Glenn Greenwald, the
Rio-based journalist who has written stories about U.S. surveillance programs
based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
"The connections
between war and surveillance are clear. I don't want to give too much away but
Glenn and I are working on a project right now that has at its center how the
National Security Agency plays a significant, central role in the U.S.
assassination program," said Scahill, speaking to moviegoers in Rio de
Janeiro, where the documentary based on his book made its Latin American debut
at the Rio Film Festival.
"There are so many
stories that are yet to be published that we hope will produce `actionable
intelligence,' or information that ordinary citizens across the world can use
to try to fight for change, to try to confront those in power," said
Scahill.
"Dirty Wars" the
film, directed by Richard Rowley, traces Scahill's investigations into the
Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. The movie, which won a prize for
cinematography at the Sundance Film Festival, follows Scahill as he hopscotches
around the globe, from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, talking to the families
of people killed in the U.S. strikes.
Neither Scahill nor
Greenwald, who also appeared at the film festival's question and answer panel,
provided many details about their joint project.
Greenwald has been making
waves since the first in a series of stories on the NSA spying program appeared
in Britain's Guardian newspaper in June. Last week, Brazilian President Dilma
Rousseff postponed a scheduled state dinner with Obama after television reports
to which Greenwald had contributed revealed that American spy programs had
aggressively targeted the Brazilian government and private citizens.
[...]
Monday, September 23, 2013
Sophie Fiennes: “Film-goers are bored with being talked down to”
by Elizabeth
Day
The Observer
[...]
Sophie Fiennes doesn't
like to make things easy for herself. The acclaimed documentary-maker's latest
project is a two-hour philosophical disquisition on the nature of ideology,
presented by the Slovenian psychoanalytic thinker, Slavoj Žižek.
[...]
"I like
to give myself a set of components or ingredients, like for cooking,"
Fiennes says when I ask her if she's got a screw loose. "So I don't quite
know how it's going to turn out."
A typical
scene from The
Pervert's Guide to Ideology, Fiennes's second collaboration with Žižek,
features the charismatic thinker expounding forcefully on the Lacanian notion
of "the big Other", with reference to popular movies ranging from The
Sound of Music to Full Metal Jacket. In a visually playful twist, Fiennes
shows Žižek speaking from replica sets, as though he is speaking from within
the films themselves – and, by extension, from within our own memories. The
result is like the most exhilarating university lecture you've ever seen.
"I
believe that people are all open to exploring the very edge of their
thinking," says Fiennes, 46, when we meet in the members' cafe at Tate
Modern, overlooking an impressive sweep of London skyline.
This is
Fiennes's seventh documentary, following on from award-winning works such as Over Your Cities, Grass Will Grow, a film project with the artist Anselm
Kiefer, and a biopic of the choreographer Michael Clark.
But in an
age when the box office relies on computer-generated cartoon characters for its
profits, is it a gamble to produce such unabashedly intellectual work?
"People
are bored with being talked down to," Fiennes replies.
Fiennes and
Žižek previously worked together on The Pervert's Guide to Cinema in 2006 (the pervert of the
title refers to the idea of perverting our preconceptions, rather than anything
more X-rated), which explored the philosopher's ideas on fantasy, sexuality and
subjectivity in film.
They have
since developed a close working relationship – Fiennes goes away and
"reads all the books", then asks Žižek to elaborate on the ideas she finds
most interesting while the camera is rolling. There is no script – sometimes
Žižek can speak for 17 minutes in full flow – which means the post-production
can be lengthy. Fiennes spent the best part of a year editing The
Pervert's Guide to Ideology.
Žižek, she
insists, has "an amazing sense of humour", at one point even agreeing
to be filmed while sitting on a lavatory.
Fiennes, who
is the sister of actors Ralph and Joseph, says her siblings are "very involved… it's great that
we all share the same interests". Her younger brother, Magnus, composed
the score for the film and the creative impulse appears to have been passed
down to Fiennes's three-year-old son, Horace, who has already developed a taste
for jazz.
Working with
Žižek has changed the way Fiennes watches films for pleasure but, she admits,
"at the moment, I'm just watching musicals with my son like High
Society and Oklahoma!."
[...]
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Is There a Method to the Syrian Madness?
On radical-emancipatory
movements and false rationales for war.
BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
[...]
As I have written before,
we all remember President Obama's smiling face, full of hope and trust, when he
repeatedly delivered the motto of his first campaign, “Yes, we can!”—we can get
rid of the cynicism of the Bush era and bring justice and welfare to the
American people. Now that the United States is backing off its push to attack Syria, we can
imagine peace protesters shouting at President Barack Obama: “How can you
advocate another military intervention?” Obama the reluctant warrior looks back
at them and murmurs perplexed: “Can I? Should I?”
And this time, he is right
to second-guess himself. All that was false in the idea and practice of
humanitarian interventions explodes in a condensed form apropos Syria. OK,
there is a bad dictator who is (allegedly) using poisonous gases against the
population of his own state. But who is opposing his regime? It seems that
whatever remained of the democratic-secular resistance is now more or less
drowned in the mess of fundamentalist Islamist groups supported by Turkey and
Saudi Arabia, with a strong presence of al-Qaeda in the shadows.
As for Assad, his Syria at
least pretends to be a secular state, so no wonder that Christian and other
minorities now tend to take his side against the Sunni rebels. In short, we are
dealing with an obscure conflict, vaguely resembling the Libyan revolt against
Gaddafi. There are no clear political stakes, no signs of a broad
emancipatory-democratic coalition, just a complex network of religious and
ethnic alliances overdetermined by the influence of superpowers (the United
States and Western Europe on the one side, Russia and China on the other). In
such conditions, any direct military intervention means political madness with
incalculable risks. What if radical Islamists take over after Assad’s fall?
Will the United States repeat their Afghanistan mistake of arming the future
al-Qaeda and Taliban cadres? What if the U.S. missiles or bombs land on Syria’s
stockpile of Sarin gas weapons? After the attack, then what?
In such a messy situation,
military intervention can only be justified by a short-term, self-destructive
opportunism. The moral outrage evoked to provide a rational cover for the
compulsion-to-intervene—“We cannot allow the use of poisonous gases on civil
population!”—is a such a sham, it doesn’t even take itself seriously. As we now
know, the United States more than tolerated the use of poisonous gases against
the Iranian army by Saddam Hussein. During the Iraq-Iran war of 1980-1988, the
United States sided with the Iraqis to quell Iranian influence in the Gulf,
despite being well aware of Iraq’s
liberal use of mustard and tear gas, according to declassified
government reports. The United States even secretly supplied Iraq with
satellite images of Iranian battlefield weaknesses to aid in the targeting of
Iranian troops. Where were moral concerns then?
The situation in Syria
should be compared to the one in Egypt. Now that the Egyptian Army has broken
the stalemate and cleansed the public space of the Islamist protesters, the
result is hundreds, maybe thousands, of dead. One should take a step back and
focus on the absent third party in the ongoing conflict: the explosion of
heterogeneous organizations (of students, women, workers) in which civil
society began to articulate its interests outside the scope of state and
religious institutions. This vast network of new social forms is the principal
gain of the Arab Spring, independent of big political changes like the Army’s
coup against the Muslim Brotherhood government or the Assad regime’s war with
Islamist extremists. It goes deeper than the religious/liberal divide. (And
even in the case of clearly fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not
to miss their social component.)
The only way for the
civil-democratic protester—in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya or Syria—to avoid being
sidestepped by religious fundamentalists is by adopting a much more radical
agenda of social and economic emancipation.
And this brings us back to
Syria: The ongoing struggle there is ultimately a false one, a struggle towards
which one should remain indifferent. The only thing to keep in mind is that
this pseudo-struggle thrives because of the absent Third, a strong
radical-emancipatory opposition whose elements were clearly perceptible in
Egypt.
As we used to say almost
half a century ago, one doesn’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the
wind blows. In Egypt’s case, I’ve argued, it
blows toward Iran—and in Syria, it blows toward Afghanistan. Even if Assad
somehow wins and stabilizes the situation, his victory will probably breed an
explosion similar to the Taliban revolution that will sweep over Syria in a
couple of years. What can save us from this prospect is only the radicalization
of the struggle for freedom and democracy into a struggle for social and
economic justice.
So what is happening in
Syria these days? Nothing really special, except that China is one step closer
to becoming the world’s new superpower while her competitors are eagerly
weakening each other.
[...]
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