At one point near the end of the Watchmen graphic novel, and in the film of the same name, Dr Manhattan tells his companion and lover Laurie that he has been blinded by a shower of tachyons that he attributes to a nuclear bomb being detonated by the ‘villain’ of …
First the Brexit vote, then Trump, and now…..the real possibility of two right-wing populist mainstream European governments within a couple of months of each other. I’m referring of course to the upcoming French elections and the ‘surprise’ British general election that Teresa May called yesterday. ‘Surprise’ to whom, one wonders? …
Special guest posting by Sarai Allen The previous post on the subject of right-wing populism discussed and critiqued Jay Frankel’s paper that made the argument for right wing working class Americans identifying with the aggressor. This was based on Frankel’s reading of Ferenczi’s paper on this subject. In this post …
I concluded my previous post on the psychopathology of Brexit by suggesting that right-wing populist ideology is an attempt to articulate a trauma. In this context, trauma can be thought of as a manifestation of the Real, as Lacan makes clear in Seminar XI. Another way to look at this …
Is Brexit the manifestation of a right-wing populism? Certainly, some of the key motivations that appear to stand behind Brexit, which include concerns about immigration, a desire to see Britain ‘great’ again, xenophobia (especially towards ‘Europeans’), a distrust of (liberal) political elites, social conservatism veering towards authoritarianism, and so on, …
And before all the those Brexiteers out there reach for their side arms this is not criticism of those who exercised their democratic right last June to ‘redefine’ our relationship with the EU. Rather, it’s an attempt to try and make some sort of sense of what’s going in the …
One of the lesser known things about the Real, and its manifestation through trauma, is its appearance in dreams. Of course, Freud himself did not have a concept of the Real, and neither did he have the concepts of Symbolic and Imaginary. Thus it was for Lacan to formalise what …
In the end it all goes back to Freud. Not that he invented the term ‘trauma,’ far from it. In fact, it’s instructive to look at how Laplanche and Pontalis introduce the topic of trauma in their entry on the subject in The Language of Psychoanalysis: ‘Trauma’ is a term …
In my post on Lacan’s concept of the Real I highlighted the fact that the Real can be seen as an effect of the Symbolic order as opposed to being ‘outside’ of it, which still seems to be a commonly held notion amongst many Lacanians.1 But how does this relate …
As Dylan Evans points out, Lacan’s use of the term ‘real’ as substantive dates back to the 1930s, and was used by a number of philosophers at the time.1 In particular, Evans cites the work of the work of Emile Meyerson, although in the Écrits Lacan only makes one passing …