SUNY series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature

Works like a Charm addresses a simple question: Why are "incentives" everywhere now? From inducements to work harder at our jobs to tax rebates for corporations, "incentive" names a general theory of motivation-according to economists, we are incentive-driven creatures. Yet far from being a neutral generalization, this understanding of human behavior smuggles in a quintessentially economic way of seeing the world. Works like a Charm applies Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic concept of retroactive causality to explain the metastasis of the language and logic of incentives: To discover an incentive is to place in the untouchable past an economic cause for a contextual, historical force. Tracing "incentive" from its roots in antiquity to its uptake by neoclassical and then Chicago-school economists, Robert O. McDonald diagnoses the spread of incentives across the social, cultural, and political field and warns readers of the dangers of handing over causality to the economists.

In the winter of 1801—02, Friedrich Hölderlin traveled more than one thousand kilometers from his home near Stuttgart to Bordeaux, partly on foot, partly by post coach. It took him two months. Then, after four months serving as a tutor, he inexplicably decided to return home. Not long after he set out, his coach was held up by highwaymen, and, with no money, he had to walk the rest of the way. By the time he arrived, he was so disheveled and disoriented his friends did not recognize him. Though Hölderlin was just thirty-two years old, the trip marked the beginning of the end of his active life as one of Germany's greatest poets and thinkers. With more than sixty black-and-white photographs by the author and eighteen historical route maps, Struck by Apollo follows Hölderlin to Bordeaux and back and beyond. David Farrell Krell retraces the journeys in striking detail, reflecting on their significance for Hölderlin's life and work in ways that will interest a wide swath of fellow thinkers and travelers.

In Telling Silence, Charles E. Scott speaks of silence, often indirectly, in such ways as to create occasions in which people might become more aware of silence in their experiences of themselves and the world around them. The core question of the book is: how can people be aware of silence without turning it into a thing and losing it? Lack of awareness of silence is lack of awareness of a major dimension of lives, both human and nonhuman. Attunements with silence enable attunements with being alive in the fragility that invests even the strengths of living beings. Telling Silence performs this attunement in descriptive accounts and instances of non-reflective awareness, awareness that does not deliberate or ponder. In twenty-three "fragments," poems, stories, and ways of thinking and speaking are brought together to intensify intimations of silence telling of itself.

Examines experimental art and literature by women alongside psychoanalysis and philosophy to develop a new understanding of sublimation and aesthetic experience. In The Aesthetic Clinic, Fernanda Negrete brings together contemporary women writers and artists well known for their formal experimentation-Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Lygia Clark, Marguerite Duras, Roni Horn, and Clarice Lispector-to argue that the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire. To elaborate this ethics, Negrete looks to notions of sublimation and feminine sexuality developed by Freud, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzsche, and their reinvention with and after Jacques Lacan, including in the schizoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. But she also highlights how psychoanalytic theory draws on writing and other creative practices to conceive of unconscious processes and the transformation sought through analysis. Thus, the "aesthetic clinic" of the book's title (a term Negrete adopts from Deleuze) is not an applied psychoanalysis or schizoanalysis. Rather, The Aesthetic Clinic privileges the call and constraints issued by each woman's individual work. Engaging an artwork here is less about retrieving a hidden meaning through interpretation than about receiving a precise transmission of sensation, a jouissance irreducible to meaning. Not only do art and literature serve an urgent clinical function in Negrete's reading but sublimation itself requires an embrace of femininity.

A comprehensive discussion of an important but elusive Lacanian concept within the field of psychoanalysis, as well as its relevance for philosophy, literature, gender, and queer studies. Whether inscribed within the context of capitalist or neoliberal logic and its imperative to "enjoy," as a critique of all forms of heteronormativity, a liberating force in a positive reading of biopolitics, the point of inflection in the ethics of psychoanalysis, or articulated in the knot of the sinthome, the concept of jouissance is either the diagnosis, response, or solution for a wide range of contemporary discontents. Why does jouissance occupy such a central place in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse? What is jouissance the name for? Originally published in Spanish in 1990, later expanded and translated into French and Portuguese, with multiple reprints in all three languages, this book addresses both theoretical and clinical applications of jouissance through a comprehensive overview of key terms in Lacan's grammar. Néstor A. Braunstein also examines it in relation to central debates within the fields of psychoanalysis, philosophy, queer theory, and literary studies to further explore the implications of Lacan's concept for contemporary thought. Néstor A. Braunstein is an Argentine Mexican psychoanalyst, author, professor, and editor who has published extensively on psychoanalysis, philosophy, visual arts, and literature, and whose work has been translated into French and Portuguese. In English, his work appears in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan. Silvia Rosman teaches at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her books include Being in Common: Nation, Subject, and Community in Latin American Literature and Culture.

Aiming to reconceptualize some of Freud's earliest psychoanalytic thinking, Andrew Barnaby's Coming Too Late argues that what Freud understood as the fundamental psychoanalytic relationship-a son's ambivalent relationship to his father-is governed not by the sexual rivalry of the Oedipus complex but by the existential predicament of belatedness. Analyzing the rhetorical tensions of Freud's writing, Barnaby shows that filial ambivalence derives particularly from the son's vexed relation to a paternal origin he can never claim as his own. Barnaby also demonstrates how Freud at once grasped and failed to grasp the formative nature of the son's crisis of coming after, a duality marked especially in Freud's readings and misreadings of a series of precursor texts-the biblical stories of Moses, Shakespeare's Hamlet, E. T. A. Hoffmann's "The Sandman"-that often anticipate the very insights that the Oedipal model at once reveals and conceals. Reinterpreting Freudian psychoanalysis through the lens of Freud's own acts of interpretation, Coming Too Late further aims to consider just what is at stake in the foundational relationship between psychoanalysis and literature.

Anthology of recent, cutting-edge work in psychoanalysis and philosophy on the concept of inheritance. In contrast to the way inheritance is understood in scientific discourse and culture more broadly, inheritance in psychoanalysis is a paradox. Although it's impossible, strictly speaking, for the unconscious to be inherited, this volume demonstrates how the concept of inheritance can occasion a rich reassessment and reinvention of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The collection enacts a critical traversal of inheritance for psychoanalysis: from the most basic assumptions of natural or biological inheritance, such as innateness, heredity, evolution, and ontogenesis, to analysis of the ways cultural traditions can be challenged and transformed, and finally to the reinvention of psychoanalytic practice, in which the ethics of inheritance is fully realized as the individual's responsibility to transform the social bond. Featuring strong interdisciplinary analysis rooted in both psychoanalysis and philosophy, this volume further engages science, politics, and cultural studies, and addresses contemporary political challenges such as autism and transgenderism. Joel Goldbach is a recent graduate of the PhD program in English at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. James A. Godley is a recent graduate of the PhD program in English at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

Explores the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings. Editing has been called the language of cinema, and thus a film's ending can be considered the final punctuation mark of this language, framing everything that came before and offering the key to both our interpretation and our enjoyment of a film. In Cinematic Cuts, scholars explore the philosophical, literary, and psychoanalytic significance of film endings, analyzing how film endings engage our fantasies of cheating death, finding true love, or determining the meaning of life. They examine how endings offer various forms of enjoyment for the spectator, from the momentary fulfillment of desire in the happy ending to the pleasurable torment of an indeterminate ending. The contributors also consider how film endings open onto larger questions relating to endings in our time. They suggest how a film ending's hidden counternarrative can be read as a political act, how our interpretation of a film ending parallels the end of a psychoanalytical session, how film endings reveal our anxieties and fears, and how cinema itself might end with the increasing intervention of digital technologies that reorient the spectator's sense of temporality and closure. Films by Akira Kurosawa, Lars von Trier, Joon-Hwan Jang, Claire Denis, Christopher Nolan, Jane Campion, John Huston, and Spike Jonze, among others, are discussed. Sheila Kunkle is Associate Professor of Individualized Studies at Metropolitan State University and the coeditor (with Todd McGowan) of Lacan and Contemporary Film.

Explores the slow but inevitable implosion of our civilization by considering the correlation between capital, work, and ideology. Unworkable discusses the ongoing implosion of our globalized world from three distinct angles: the capitalist elimination of labor through technological automation, the dissolution of our shared social narratives, and the subtle imposition of an increasingly pervasive ideological order. Aiming to root out the lost cause of this implosion, Fabio Vighi returns to Marx by way of Hegel, Lacan, Gorz, Baudrillard, and other thinkers who, in different ways, have reflected on the complex dialectical structure of modernity and its hidden conditions of possibility. Capitalism, Vighi argues, fundamentally redefined the meaning of work and prevented the emergence of alternative forms of life. In our own time, the delusions of work and the values that propel life under capitalism have become, in Vighi's analysis, unworkable. And yet, even as we become an increasingly "workless" society, we continue to abide by the same laws of productivity and profit.

A Black Forest Walden is a work of philosophical reflection, nature description, and sly humor. In brief chapters, or aphorisms, the American philosopher David Farrell Krell recounts his experiences in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Germany's Black Forest, where he has lived for several decades. Insofar as Krell compares his experiences with those of Henry David Thoreau, who serves as both inspiration and irritation, the book could be described, as a critical commentary on Thoreau's Walden. Yet, it equally reads as a rigorous yet playful and profoundly literary manifestation of where and how the mind wanders. Hence, the "Marlonbrando" of the subtitle is not the late actor, but a feral cat, who frequents the cabin and comes to be an important interlocutor, as if playing the role of analyst to the author. The subjects Krell treats are wide-ranging: the changing seasons, environmental issues, romantic love, parent-child relations, European versus American "values," higher education, artistic creativity, solitude, and the contrast between lifestyles in a quiet Black Forest village and in a noisy contemporary United States. Forty-one black-and-white photographs taken by the author accompany and enliven the text.

Examines representations of surplus enjoyment in postcolonial literature and film to focus on self-other relations rather than difference. Postcolonial Lack reconvenes dialogue between Lacanian psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory in order to expand the range of cultural analyses of the former and make the latter theoretically relevant to the demands of contemporary narratives of othering, exclusion, and cultural appropriation. Seeking to resolve the mutual suspicion between the disciplines, Gautam Basu Thakur draws out the connections existing between Lacan's teachings on subjectivity and otherness and writings of postcolonial and decolonial theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Frantz Fanon, and Homi Bhabha. By developing new readings of the marginalized other as radical impasse and pushing the envelope on neoliberal identity politics, the book moves postcolonial studies away from the perennial topic of identity and difference and into examining the form and function of the other as excess-surplus and/or lack-in colonial and postcolonial literature, film, and social discourse. Looking at writings by Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh, Leila Aboulela, Narayan Gangopadhyay, Katherine Boo, and films by Gillo Pontecorvo , Clint Eastwood, Ryan Coogler (Black Panther), and Tony Gatlif, Basu Thakur highlights a new set of ethical and political considerations emerging as a direct result of this shift and stakes a fundamental rethinking of postcoloniality through what he calls the "politics of ontological discordance." Gautam Basu Thakur is Associate Professor of English at Boise State University. He is the author of Postcolonial Theory and Avatar and coeditor (with Jonathan Michael Dickstein) of Lacan and the Nonhuman.