Boštjan Nedoh

This book examines the philosophical and political relevance of perversion in the works of three key representatives of contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Lacan. Perversion is often understood simply in terms of cultural or sexual phenomena. By contrast, Boštjan Nedoh places perversion at the heart of philosophical, ontological and political issues in the works of Deleuze, Agamben and Lacan. He examines the relevance of their discussions of perversion for their respective critical ontological projects. By tracing the differences between these thinkers’ understanding of perversion, the book finally draws lines of delimitation between the vitalist and the structuralist or psychoanalytic philosophical positions in contemporary philosophy.

https://www.rowmaninternational.com/book/ontology_and_perversion/3-156-bc3b3259-62ea-469f-ab39-6ab1247c7a69

https://www.amazon.com/Ontology-Perversion-Deleuze-Agamben-Futures/dp/1786605511

When it comes to questions of objectivity in current philosophical debates and public discourse, we are witnessing the re-emergence and growing importance of two classical, opposed approaches: nominalism and (metaphysical) realism. Today’s nominalist stances, by absolutizing intersubjectivity, are moving towards the abandonment of the very notion of truth and objective reality. By contrast, today’s realist positions, including those bound up with scientific discourse, insist on the category of the object-in-itself as irreducible to any kind of subjective mediation. However, despite their seeming mutual exclusivity, both approaches share fundamental presuppositions, namely, those of neat separations between the spheres of subjectivity and objectivity as well as between the realms of fiction and truth. This volume, relying on contemporary continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, and the Marxist tradition, moves beyond the deadlock between nominalism and realism. It rethinks the relationship between objectivity and fiction through engaging with a series of “objective fictions,” including fetishes, semblances, lies, rumours, sophistry, fantasies, and conspiracy theories, among other phenomena. What all these phenomena exhibit are paradoxical entanglements of subjectivity with objectivity and of fiction with truth.

The article discusses the paradoxical status of messianism in Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. This status conveys most of all in the specific location that messianism assumes with regard to religion. Agamben himself, as well as main interpretations, conceive messianism as a “limit point” in which “religious experience passes beyond itself”, and therefore as a non-religious phenomenon. After briefly summing up the main conceptual line that led Agamben towards such a conclusion, the article shows how Agamben’s concept of the messianic must be read having as its background his reading of Freud’s fetishist disavowal from his early work Stanzas, where Agamben argues in favour of the latter insofar as he understands fetishism as a privileged weapon against the metaphysics under which he subsumes modern semiology as well as the psychoanalytic concept of interpretation of the repressed unconscious content. Although Agamben’s reading of Freud may seem convincing, he nevertheless misreads a rather crucial moment in Freud’s theory, represented by the concept of primal repression. Considering this concept, fetishist disavowal appears rather as an operation that holds the subject within metaphysics and interpretation at the point in which the subject may encounter its limit, represented exactly by the primal repression, which marks the moment of incompleteness or non-totalisability of interpretation as such. In this sense, according to Lacan’s reading of Freud, fetishism, by fixing the image and projecting it on the veil, rather constitutes the phallic realm “beyond” the veil, which makes interpretation infinite. With this as its basis, the article finally turns back to the initial question and claims that messianism is neither a religious nor a non-religious concept, but rather the interval in which religion overcomes itself – yet this overcoming, insofar as it is traversed by eternal postponement, cannot accomplish itself.

Notwithstanding the fact that already in his early essay “The Logical Time” Lacan suggested that the “ontological form of anxiety” is the constitutive element in the process of the constitution of subjectivity, thus far there have only been rare attempts at inquiring into the relation between the affect of anxiety and Lacan’s critique of classical ontology, which this article will try to explore. Specifically, my argument will be that Lacanian anxiety, unlike, for instance, its Heideggerian variation, is inextricably connected with the third dimension of being, which amounts to what Lacan in Seminar XI labelled “the unrealized,” i.e. to the peculiar structure of the unconscious, which distorts the classical ontological opposition between being and non-being. For Lacan, the unconscious, rather than referring simply to repressed unconscious content, is instead structured around a “pre-ontological” gap (Lacan) or “ontological negativity” (Zupančič). While anxiety notoriously “does not deceive,” it does not deceive only regarding the subject’s encounter with the real, but also – and most importantly – regarding the specific ontological structure of the unconscious, which includes the negativity as its own “material cause”. In this respect, anxiety might be regarded as an “ontological” or even objective material affect – yet not in a posthumanist sense of the affect of being/matter, but rather as the affective correlate or material signal for the fracture of being itself. In short, without this specific ontological gap/negativity, there would only be fear and frustration, not anxiety, which brings anxiety into the domain of metapsychology.

In the article, the author continues his recent discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s proposal to rethink anew Western political philosophy on the basis of the figure of refugee. In this first part, the article critically overviews Agamben’s criticism of biopolitical concepts of human rights, citizenship and the nation-state through the lens of Freudian-Lacanian theory of repression. If, as Agamben maintains, bare life is a “vanishing presupposition” in the constitution of the citizenship and the nation-state, it can be regarded also as primal repressed signifier in Freudian sense, which is then represented by the signifier “citizen” in the symbolic political-juridical order of the nation-state. In turn, refugees or stateless people in general, appear on the scene as the “return of the repressed” insofar as they embody the affective substitute of the primal repressed signifier. Against the background of this preliminary critical overview, the article proceeds further by examining Agamben’s idea of “aterritoriality” or “extraterritoriality” of the state as corresponding to the political community founded upon the figure of the refugee. It is in this deterritorialized or “curved” topological space that the subjective destitution of the nation may occur by way of untying the biopolitical nexus state-nation-territory. The article concludes by proposing such a subjective destitution of European nations to be the mode in which Europe could and should re-constitute itself.

This article examines Giorgio Agamben’s rejection of the religious term Holocaust as a name for the extermination of the Jewish people. Agamben rejects this term (and eventually prefers the term Shoah) insofar as it implies a sacrificial exchange with the divine. He argues that the Jews were not killed sacrificial victims, but as (biopolitical) homines sacri. Yet, in so doing, Agamben also denies the redemptive potential of the term Holocaust, preventing the victims to find a place in public memory. In fact, he overlooks that the “Final Solution” involved also the plan of the erasure of all traces of the extermination itself. The article tries to challenge Agamben’s view with the help of László Nemes’s film Son of Saul. It argues that Nemes’ film is a unique example of the film about Holocaust that avoids regression into positions that Agamben criticizes. As such, the film can be regarded as an example of Benjaminian messianic redemption.

In 2015 and 2016, with the opening of the “Balkan refugee route,” Europe faced the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Considering the fact that masses of refugees crossed the borders of EU states “illegally,” therein demonstrating an effective suspension of the Schengen border regime, this crisis brought into crisis the sovereignties of the nation-states as well. In this context, the article will try to offer a rereading of Giorgio Agamben’s theory of the state of exception, arguing that insofar as the refugee crisis suspended the Schengen border regime and consequently revealed national sovereignty as fictional, it can be considered as a messianic event in the precise sense that Agamben assigned to this term.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1743872117703717

The main purpose of the article is to examine the conceptual place of panic within psychoanalysis. This part thus begins by highlighting Freud’s impasses in his effort to place panic in the conceptual framework of his Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he does not manage to draw a dividing line between panic and anxiety. Notwithstanding the indefiniteness of the definition of panic, Freud nevertheless insists on stressing the inherent link between panic and the moment of the disintegration of a group or social ties. It turns out that the impasse related to panic is in fact a duplication of a more fundamental problem of the definition of anxiety itself. Here, Freud tries to subsume under a single concept two heterogeneous forms of anxiety: real anxiety and anxiety as a signal for danger. This impasse is then resolved with the introduction of Lacan’s theory of anxiety from his Seminar X, in which anxiety features as the affect that emerges at the moment of “the lack of the lack” of castration. Two different forms of anxiety derive from this: anxiety which together with panic functions as a “defence” against the real or as a support for the metonymy of desire, and anxiety proper, which marks the moment of the irreversible encounter with the real. Traversing this moment of anxiety is correlative and inherent to the moment of traversing the fantasy as well as to so called “transference of anxiety” (anxiety of the Other), which does not mean a simple reactionary return to panic as the mode of sustaining desire.

In his Seminar X, Lacan repeatedly advocates Kierkegaard’s thesis from his The Concept of Anxiety according to which “woman is more anxious than man”. This claim brings us directly to the problem of the conceptual relation between anxiety and sexual difference. The aim of this article is to show the inextricable connection between above-mentioned claim  (together with conceptual context of Seminar X and Freud’s theory of repression) and Lacan’s discussion developed in Seminar XX about the so-called formulas of sexuation. For if it is possible to argue that the anxiety of women is actually the anxiety of the Other since women represent a sexual difference for men, then it is also possible to link the greater anxiety of women precisely to the fact that in Seminar XX Lacan places the barred, inexistent Other, which stands for the inexistence of the sexual relation as such, on the woman’s side of the formulas of sexuation. Anxiety of woman/Other is therefore inextricably related to the feminine mystical jouissance and is as such irreducible to the subjective anxiety, which is the affect of phallic jouissance.

This article tries to establish a possible dialogue between the way in whichtwo influential contemporary theories, Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical theoryand Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis, approach racism and the constitution of Otherness. After summing up key concepts in Esposito’s theory, the articlelays out the very deadlock in his work, represented by his assumption of racialdifference or Otherness as inscribed in the bio-logical content of human life.However, by interpreting Jewishness under Nazism in terms of ‘undead’ ‘fleshwithout body’, Esposito himself crosses paths with the psychoanalytic approach,in so far as Lacan defined the Freudian death drive using the same term. Thesecond part of the article is thus dedicated to the articulation of the relationsbetween primal repression, trauma and jouissance, out of which can be derivedan alternative conception of biopolitics, based on the discursive constitution of Otherness, rather than on the assumption that it is a biological fact.

The article discusses the paradoxical status of messianism in Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. This status conveys most of all in the specific location that messianism assumes with regard to religion. Agamben himself, as well as main interpretations, conceive messianism as a “limit point” in which “religious experience passes beyond itself”, and therefore as a non-religious phenomenon. After briefly summing up the main conceptual line that led Agamben towards such a conclusion, the article shows how Agamben’s concept of the messianic must be read having as its background his reading of Freud’s fetishist disavowal from his early work Stanzas, where Agamben argues in favour of the latter insofar as he understands fetishism as a privileged weapon against the metaphysics under which he subsumes modern semiology as well as the psychoanalytic concept of interpretation of the repressed unconscious content. Although Agamben’s reading of Freud may seem convincing, he nevertheless misreads a rather crucial moment in Freud’s theory, represented by the concept of primal repression. Considering this concept, fetishist disavowal appears rather as an operation that holds the subject within metaphysics and interpretation at the point in which the subject may encounter its limit, represented exactly by the primal repression, which marks the moment of incompleteness or non-totalisability of interpretation as such. In this sense, according to Lacan’s reading of Freud, fetishism, by fixing the image and projecting it on the veil, rather constitutes the phallic realm “beyond” the veil, which makes interpretation infinite. With this as its basis, the article finally turns back to the initial question and claims that messianism is neither a religious nor a non-religious concept, but rather the interval in which religion overcomes itself – yet this overcoming, insofar as it is traversed by eternal postponement, cannot accomplish itself.

This paper first outlines the key traits of some critiques of Agamben’s theory of the subject. What they have in common is an emphasis on the limitations of his conception of political agency, which is based on the one hand on an apathetic and passive figure such as the Muselmann, and on the other, on Bartleby, the Scrivener, who epitomises Agamben’s notion of potentiality. Following this short review I then focus on Agamben’s recent article “K.,” in which he compares and contrasts the two Kafkian figures of K. from The Trial and The Castle in the context of Roman law. Considering Benjamin’s distinction between a virtual and real state of exception, Josef K. and land surveyor K. adopt two different positions with regard to the form of law on which the structure of sovereignty is based. Josef K. represents bare life, which persists along the internal boundary that is constitutive of the form of law, while land surveyor K. is the subject that manages to erase this internal boundary and, thus, represents the only Agambenian figure that can effectively suspend and abolish the form of law.