This article is the editorial introduction to a special issue of Filozofski Vestnik dedicated to Joan Copjec’s 1994 book Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. It proposes that an enduring resistance to Copjec’s insights across the theoretical humanities must be understood as a symptom of the radical shift in thinking the book provokes, disguised as a proud defense of the illiteracy of desire Copjec indicts. Tracking this proud illiteracy to its origins in the intellectual fallout from the 1968 student revolts in Paris, the author argues that returning to Read My Desire now, thirty years since its initial publication, can inform an engagement with student radicalism, and youth in revolt more generally, that is ethically responsive to the political and social exigencies of the present. The article concludes with a summary of the issue’s other contributions and the ways in which they each introduce novel readings of Read My Desire that demonstrate the book’s lasting impact and reiterate its still-unread potential
Raziskava se posveča enemu od glavnih razlogov za zavračanje zgodnje vakcinacije, ki je vezan na samo razumevanje bolezni črnih koz. Zaradi poteka, hitrosti širjenja in stopnje smrtnosti je ta nalezljiva bolezen veljala za eno najhujših nadlog človeštva, je pa tudi edina človeška nalezljiva bolezen, ki je bila izkoreninjena, pri čemer je imela ključno vlogo vakcinacija. V študiji bo raziskano, kakšno je bilo razumevanje variole v času, ki še ne temelji na vednosti o patogenih mikrobih kot povzročiteljih bolezni. Prispevek pokaže, da so običajni ljudje in zdravniki črne koze razumeli različno, poleg tega pa so se različna razumevanja te bolezni spreminjala, medsebojno izključevala, a tudi prepletala in kombinirala. Temeljna ugotovitev članka je, da je razumevanje variole kot prirojene nujnosti, ki prečisti telo, delovalo kot eden glavnih razlogov za zavračanje vakcinacije.
This essay explores a possible traversal of anxiety in dialogue with Chapter 5 of Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire, “Vampires, Breastfeeding, and Anxiety.” At stake in this traversal is an act of freedom that opens up a future for the human. Starting with the play of Freudian resonances in Copjec’s title, “Breast and the Jetty” plays, in turn, as an echo of “Death and the Maiden” that enables an analysis of fantasy as a solution to castration anxiety in the neurotic, which has the effect of circumscribing desire. Analyses of the problematics of the breast as partial object and object-cause of desire, and of the “forbidden woman” Copjec locates in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, emphasize a shift from Lacanian theory, centered on the symbolic, to Willy Apollon’s recent metapsychology, developed from GIFRIC’s clinic for the treatment of psychosis in Quebec. By attending to this work, and to the nuances of originary fantasy Lucie Cantin offers, I discern the qualities of an unfettered quest of desire, independent from the conditions of neurotic fantasy and capable of confronting a future for which there is no reference in language.
In chapter 6 of Read My Desire, Joan Copjec argues that the constitutive limits of American democracy reveal themselves symptomatically in the electoral choice of a conspicuously incompetent sovereign figure. In a leader for whom governing is exposed as an “impossible profession” (Freud), the Other’s castration appears as a universalsign, which provokes an hysterical form of love even among would-be critics. This essay examines a crucial supplementation to this leader-group dynamic in the “neighborly” structure of voting. When a subject votes, she registers a signifier of her difference as a mark that both estranges her (by turning her difference into a data point) and also situates her in an equivalent alignment with other voters who are either “with” or “against” her position, enabling an imaginary mirror play. From this position of non-interactionand reflective doubling, the subject is invited to participate in a peculiar calculation with respect to what are known as “swing voters,” a demographically constructed set of individuals whose presumptive action is thought to decide the nation’s fate. This hypothetical “subject supposed to vote” is then considered such that the voter, as well as the candidate, adjust their actions based on the anticipated certainty of the fateful mark. In the election cycles that have come to dominate virtually every aspect of civic life, the imputed calculations of this little semblable (granted informational density through interminable polling and fantasized in racist caricature) exert a temporal pressure on democratic subjects that often forces hasty decisions. Through a comparative reading of Copjec’s chapter with Lacan’s essay “Logical Time,” this essay concludes by interpreting the intersubjective logic behind this temporal forcing.
Članek posebno številko Filozofskega vestnika umesti v stanje raziskav na področju zgodovine in filozofije znanosti. Na eni strani izpostavi pomanjkanje prevoda sociologije znanstvenega spoznanja (SZS) v slovenski epistemologiji, na drugi strani pa opozori na nekatere nerazrešene probleme SZS, na katere se odzivajo nekateri aktualni trendi v študijah znanosti, kot so globalni obrat in pozivi k dekolonizaciji. V odsotnosti koherentnih miselnih šol namen tako ni uvažati rešitev iz tujine, ampak ob posodabljanju izvajati tudi kritiko aktualnih raziskav, glede na katere naj bi se ta posodobitev izvedla, in tako priti do epistemologije z lokalnimi karakteristikami. Orisani so trije metodološki premiki, ki jih članki v številki razvijajo v polemiki z obstoječimi študijami znanosti. Prvič, razširjajo geografski razpon zgodovinskih primerov preučevanih znanstvenih praks ne samo onkraj globalnega severa, ampak tudi onkraj meja nekdanjega angleškega in francoskega imperija. Drugič, pokažejo, da je – navezujoč se na načelo simetrije – mogoče in smiselno z enakimi pristopi analizirati pojmovanja elitnih intelektualcev, jukateških gospodinj, habsburških uradnikov, kranjskih kmetov, zdravnikov, vremenoslovcev ali članov jugoslovanske Zvezne komisije za jedrsko energijo. Tretjič, znanstvenih praks ne obravnavajo le kot antropološkega mikroobjekta, ampak jih vedno preučujejo v povezavi s posebnimi odnosi moči, v katerih se odvijajo.
This essay argues that the contemporary relevance of psychoanalysis and Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire can be derived from Sigmund Freud’s consistent rejection of the program of the “re-enchantment of the world.” Facing the onslaught of technological modernity, many of Freud’s contemporaries lamented the disenchantment of the world. Today, this tradition persists as a renewed desire for a shared or common world; we collectively mourn the loss of the world. But, in this context, Copjec’s work raises a disturbing question: can a sexed being have a world? In order to draw out some of the consequences of this question, the essay examines the role Immanuel Kant’s philosophy plays in Read My Desire in two steps: first, it addresses the theoretical argument against the existence of the world, and second, it examines some of the practical consequences of this insight. By providing a parallel reading of Kant’s reflections on the antinomies of cosmological ideas and Jacques Lacan’s formulae of sexuation, Copjec effectively establishes the fact that “the world” and “sex” are mutually exclusive categories.
What are the contemporary forms of the Foucauldian historicism that Read My Desire sought to correct? In the theoretical humanities, the most insurgent variant is surely the revival of the turn not to the real, but to reality; to the material or phenomenal and, ultimately, to being as such. Generally speaking, this contemporary orientation of thought aims either to emancipate humanity from the determinative distortions of subjectivity, of the transcendental constitution of apperception, or else to dislodge this human function from the privilege of its presumed centrality, thereby relegating it to the same plane occupied by every other animate and inanimate being. As this paper argues, the agential realist’s definition of causality, despite its claims to complexity and indeterminacy (not to mention a lineage that connects back to the same structuralist linguistics that shaped Lacan’s thought), is ultimately guilty on the charge of historicism. Precisely in their allergy to the strange causal faculty of negativity, the argument’s conceptions of “material-discursive interactions” and “intra-agential spactimematterings” are the crime’s telltale clues. In short, the ambiguously defined relation of discourse to a consistently indeterminate idea of matter, and the subsequent disappearance of discourse’s non-closure or incompletion from the causal field, not only obfuscates the signifier’s retroactive creationist powers, but also renders illegible what we might call the desire of the empirical natural sciences in both their humanist-progressivist and properly unconscious forms.
Prispevek obravnava razvoj koncepta pasme in pasemsko razvrščanje goveda na Kranjskem v 19. stoletju. Oba procesa sta raziskana z analizo arhivskih in objavljenih tiskanih virov. Članek moderni koncept pasme in sistem pasemskega klasificiranja obravnava kot obliko vednosti, ki se je legitimirala z metodami opazovanja in merjenja, s čimer se je tudi distancirala od drugih predhodnih in obstoječih sistemov klasificiranja kmečkih živali. Pasme so podrobneje opredelili in standardizirali kmetijski strokovnjaki z objavo kmetijske literature, ki je opisovala lastnosti izbranih obstoječih pasem, določala kriterije za pripadnost živali tem pasmam in predlagala rejske prakse za ohranjanje pasem. Obravnavano klasificiranje se je razvilo in bilo uveljavljeno pod vplivi ekonomskih interesov države, kmetijskih družb in kmetijskih strokovnjakov ter velikih živinorejcev, ki so spodrinili predhodne sisteme klasificiranja in oblikovali ter institucionalizirali pojmovanje izbranih pasem.
Aksolotl (Ambystoma Mexicanum), zanimiva vodna pošast, laboratorijski organizem, nacionalni simbol, ki krasi mehiške bankovce, je žival, ki nastopa v več medvrstnih prepletih. Odkar je bil v sredini 19. stoletja premeščen iz mehiške jezerske doline v evropske laboratorije, se je večina raziskovalcev osredotočala predvsem na beleženje preobrazbe te vrste v modelni organizem v znanstvenih raziskavah. Aksolotl uspeva kot modelni organizem v kontroliranih pogojih, medtem ko je v svojem naravnem okolju uvrščen med ogrožene vrste. V tem članku se zgodovine aksolotla lotim s pomočjo konjunkturalističnega pristopa, pri čemer se osredotočam na aksolotlov prehod iz njegovega endemičnega okolja (jezera) v epistemični prostor (laboratorij). Trdim, da je ta premik povzročil razdvojitev vednosti o aksolotlu, ki se je razvila v njegovem naravnem habitatu, od vednosti, proizvedene v umetnem okolju laboratorija. Prek prepletanja pripovedi in kontekstov, ki aksolotla obdajajo v različnih okoljih, članek poskuša spodbuditi dialog med avtohtonimi perspektivami in znanstvenimi praksami. Poleg tega bo pokazal, da habitate pomembno oblikujejo zunanji dejavniki, ki pogosto postanejo neprepoznavni po tem, ko žival vstopi v laboratorij. Obravnava teh zapletov bo razkrila, da je naše razumevanje neke vrste neločljivo povezano s kontekstom, v katerem se proučuje, in nakazala možnosti zbliževanja pripovedi iz različnih okolij
The following is a retrospective interview with Joan Copjec on her formative 1994 book, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. The interviewer asks Copjec to reflect on the political and academic context surrounding the book’s initial publication, her personal inspiration for writing it as she did, and its enduring relevance after thirty years. Copjec also situates Read My Desire with respect to her recent work concerning the films of Abbas Kiarostami; the changed cultural and intellectual status of psychoanalysis today; the uncanny dimension of American electoral politics and the unthought fantasies that structure it; and the history of the relation between psychoanalysis and Islam. The interview concludes with some indication of where Copjec’s research, teaching, and writing are headed now and into the future.
Arhivi so za ustvarjanje zgodovine osrednjega pomena že vsaj od 19. stoletja. Toda proučevanje domačih arhivov v Sotuti na Jukatanu (Mehika) zahteva odmik od tradicionalnega pojmovanja arhivov kot popisanih papirjev, saj je bila regija stoletja žrtev memoricida in uničevanja dokumentarne dediščine. Kar pa polotok dejansko premore, so solarji, majevski vrtovi ali gospodinjska zemljišča, ki kot vzorec v krajini ohranjajo vire, oskrbovane že od davnih časov, skupaj z znanjem o njihovi uporabi. V tem članku raziskujemo možnost, da bi solarje obravnavali kot arhive, pri čemer se opiramo na pomembna koncepta jukateških Majev: tsikbal, pogovor, in ts‘iib, pisava, pa tudi moje osebne izkušnje v Sotuti. Besedilo je navdihnjeno s pojmoma »pluriverzuma« in »arhivskega multiverzuma« iz latinskoameriške družbene teorije oziroma arhivistike. Tako bomo videli, kako nam lahko preizpraševanje tradicionalnega pojmovanja arhivov omogoči, da zgodovinopisno prakso prilagodimo ozemljem, ki jih preučujemo.
This essay examines Chapter 4 of Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire, “The Sartorial Superego,” in order to advance its critique of racism as a form of perversion that posits the racial other as a superegoic Other believed to harbor an obscene enjoyment or “will to jouissance.” While other chapters of Read My Desire have played a pivotal role in shaping Lacanian theory over the past thirty years—especially Lacanian film theory (“Locked Room/Lonely Room”) and Lacanian sex theory (“Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason”)—“The Sartorial Superego” has yet to receive the attention it deserves for the contribution it makes not only to Lacanian race theory but also to Lacanian ethics more generally. Aiming to redress this oversight, the essay first revisits Copjec’s critique of the perverse “sartorial superegoism” at work in a series of photographs of cloth-donned colonial others taken by the famed French psychologist G. G. de Clérambault, in order to bring this critique into sharper relief. It then applies Copjec’s analysis of Clérambault’s sartorial superegoism to more recent, far more sadistic instances of sartorial superegoic violence perpetrated against postcolonial others in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In so doing, the essay demonstrates that properly grasping both the prescience of and the urgency behind Read My Desire’s concluding call for “another logic of the superego [to] commence” requires reckoning with “The Sartorial Superego.”
Po koncu druge svetovne vojne se je Jugoslavija oprla na sovjetsko ideološko pojmovanje družbe kot ideal za vsa življenjska področja, tudi za znanost. V skladu s tem naj bi znanstveno delo v državi potekalo plansko, centralizirano in opredeljeno s partijsko linijo. Po sporu z ZSSR leta 1948 se je Jugoslavija zlasti sprva geopolitično močno naslonila na zahodni blok. To je privedlo do oblikovanja novega državnega sistema »socialističnega samoupravljanja«, pa tudi do razmaha novih diskurzivnih in organizacijskih trendov v jugoslovanski znanosti, ki so bili združljivi z določenimi elementi pogleda na znanost kot avtonomen sistem – kar je prevladujoča predstava o znanosti na Zahodu. Predstavili bomo razvoj jugoslovanskega jedrskega programa v obdobju med letoma 1948 in 1971. Kljub spremembam, ki so se v državi zaradi geopolitičnega premika zgodile na področju organizacije znanosti in znanstvenega diskurza, bomo pokazali, da je bila zastavljena organizacija jedrskega programa še zmeraj pretežno skladna s sovjetskim modelom. Šele ko je jedrski program začel izgubljati politični pomen, se je usmeril k večji avtonomiji, kar je pomenilo večjo osredotočenost na investicijsko učinkovitost, tj. omejitev neposrednih vlaganj in nadzora države. Naš cilj je analiza delovanja dveh prevladujočih pogledov na znanost v času hladne vojne v kontekstu geopolitičnih in družbeno-gospodarskih procesov v (pol)perifernem jugoslovanskem socialističnem sistemu ter njunega odkritega in prikritega učinkovanja na primeru jedrskega programa.
Prispevek na novo osvetljuje raziskovalni program iz 19. stoletja, ki ga je Susan Faye Cannon po pruskem učenjaku Alexandru von Humboldtu (1769–1859) poimenovala »humboldtovska znanost«. Danes standardna interpretacija humboldtovske znanosti, ki jo je v devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja razvil Michael Dettelbach, opisuje skupek kvantitativnih, zakonitosti iščočih kartografskih ved, ki so temeljile na obsežnem sodelovanju učenjakov in imperialnih uradnikov na področjih, ki segajo od meteorologije in magnetizma do geologije in botanične geografije. Novi pogledi kolonialnega in globalnega zgodovinopisja »humboldtovski« projekt razkrivajo kot razpršen sistem raziskovanja, ki ga je oblikovala razprostranjena geografija imperijev in ekstrakcije, predvsem globalna rudarska industrija. Kar je Humboldt poimenoval »fizika sveta«, je imelo globoke korenine v pruskem ekspanzionizmu in rudarski dejavnosti v devetdesetih letih 18. stoletja. Nato pa je bila koordinirana med imperiji vzhoda in zahoda, na blagovnih mejah iberske Amerike in ruske Sibirije. V članku se vračamo k Humboldtu, da bi razgrnili prepleteno zgodovino znanosti, ki so bile izvorno v službi agresivnih držav in imperijev v Evropi in zunaj nje.
Standardne zgodovine podnebne znanosti prikazujejo dolgo in imenitno razvojno pot raziskovanja antropogenega globalnega segrevanja. Tovrstni opisi izpostavljajo posamične fizike iz 19. in 20. stoletja, ki so ugotovili, da lahko kurjenje fosilnih goriv privede do ogrevanja Zemlje, vendar so jih pri tem sodobniki na videz ignorirali. Ta zapis se bo namesto tega osredotočil na prvine, ki v standardni pripovedi umanjkajo. Organiziran je okoli treh zgodovinskih procesov, ki so neizbrisno zaznamovali zgodovino znanosti o podnebju: teoretskih razmišljanj o razlikah med ljudmi, širjenja imperijev in industrializacije. Geografsko se bomo pri tem osredotočili na Evropo in njene kolonije. Zgodovinski opisi podnebne znanosti, ki zanemarjajo njene povezave z evropskim kolonializmom in rasnim kapitalizmom, prinašajo nevarnost zacementiranja znanstvene kulture, ki te oblike zatiranja nadaljuje. Ta zapis se začenja s pregledom, kako se je pomen besede »podnebje« med zgodnjo moderno dobo in 19. stoletjem spreminjal v odgovor na geografska poročila evropskih popotnikov in zdravnikov ter v spregi s preobrazbo atmosfere v predmet laboratorijskega proučevanja. Zadnje poglavje to zgodovino privede do sedanjosti, pri čemer sledi dediščini kolonializma v dobo digitalnih podnebnih modelov.
In honor of the thirtieth anniversary of Joan Copjec’s important and influential text, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, this essay explores how the psychoanalytic conceptualization of desire operates musically as much as linguistically. If the unconsciousis structured like a language, then music is structured like a desire for a language to be already spoken for. Franz Schubert’s evocative lieder literally speak about music’s capacity to capture and tarry with desire as a force always to be reckoned with.
Here we seek to respond to the renewed interest that still life enjoys today: to draw out its symptomatic value, which would make still life the point of determination, within art history's discourse, of the broader return to things now unfolding across diverse fields-from philosophy to anthropology. To return to things would thus mean to return to the object. Yet it is precisely by refusing to let the concept of the thing collapse into the indeterminacy of an object that still life may be reimagined anew-once we attend to its profoundly domestic dimension, where "house" signifies less a building than possession, one's own place, one's domain, one's home. In this way, still life is restored to its appropriative vocation, against the descriptive logics that so often provide its theoretical frame. It is a way of displacing the discourse of objectification and the discourses of "scientific observation" in favour of another, far more ancient perspective: that of domestic economy. Conceived as the regulation of one's own goods, the ordering of the things of the household, domestic economy would then offer, in a sense, the theoretical formula for what seems to take place in the anthropological depths of still life: a pictorial art of tidying, arranging, disposing-an entire art of the home.
In a 1967 article for Cahiers pour l'Analyse, Jacques Nassif shifts the focus of Freud's "'A Child is Being Beaten'" from the aetiology of perversions to the question of fantasy. Nassif concludes that there is a fundamental fantasy exhibited in these cases and conducts an "archaeology" of this fundamental fantasy, locating the origin of fantasy with the origin of sexual difference: castration and the Oedipus complex. In the final lines of the article, Nassif wonders if "another fantasy," with a different verbalization that corresponds to a "another body," could be built on this structure, but admits his reading does not permit an answer to this question. I propose that a reading that shifts the focus in the text again provides both an affirmative answer to Nassif's question as well as indications of an elaboration. On my reading, without abandoning Nassif, ambivalence is the conceptual focus. Ambivalence, as Freud formulates it, is not just the reversal of feelings into their opposite, like love transformed into hate. Rather, ambivalence is the co-presence of things "different in their nature," and this co-presence modifies these things chained together. In the context of the fantasy in "'A Child is Being Beaten,'" this shift in conceptual focus results in an alternative schema of the Oedipus complex, an analysis of drive as a linguistic representation of the ambivalent relation, and the Lacanian concept of the letter as the precipitate of this ambivalent relation circuited by the drive. The conclusion, here, is that the fantasies recorded in the text do not only express a fundamental fantasy about the origin of the sexes, as Nassif suggests, but express a fundamental fantasy about the conditions of signification tout court. The article ends on an open question-cued by Nassif's closing question in his essay-regarding the possibility of further reconciliation between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis in light of this analysis of ambivalence, drive, and the letter.
Jacques Nassif's commentary on Freud's analysis of the fustigation fantasy ("A child is being beaten") offers several incisive points of entry into Freud's conceptualization of fantasy and its relation to other central notions of psychoanalysis. This text examines its connection to the drives, as well as the distinction between the structural, the individual, and the singular in fantasy formation, emphasizing Freud's notion of "construction in analysis" as pivotal. It highlights the difference between the "fundamental fantasy" and the so-called "original fantasies," and proposes an articulation of the relation between drives and fantasy grounded in the concept of primal repression (Urverdr & auml;ngung).
The article approaches Freud's concept of the choice of neurosis (Neurosenwahl) through Jacques Nassif's 1968 essay "Freud and Science." In this text, Nassif focuses on the ways in which Jean-Martin Charcot influenced the development of Freud's thought, highlighting in particular Charcot's decisive gesture of isolating neurosis as a purely psychological affection. The article accordingly proceeds from the hypothesis that the repetition of the break-which Nassif identifies as the central methodological gesture of psychoanalysis-takes place here in the form of a repetition and radicalization of Charcot's "choice of neurosis." In other words, the problem of the choice of neurosis could be posed only on the basis of Charcot's prior gesture, and if Freud wished to remain faithful to this gesture, he had to articulate the choice of neurosis as a speculative, metapsychological concept. The article shows that the choice of neurosis functions as a nodal point between empiricism, psychoanalytic technique, and metapsychological speculation, and, on another level, between ontogenetic and phylogenetic approaches: a constellation that becomes particularly clear in the analysis of the initially lost and later rediscovered twelfth and final metapsychological essay, "Overview of the Transference Neuroses."
