School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemPlatonic meditations: the work of Alain Badiou( 2001)The work of Alain Badiou is still almost unknown in English-speaking countries, if now almost unavoidable on the continent itself. Following the publication of his magnum opus, L’être et l’événement, in 1988, Badiou has continued to elaborte a philosophy which rejects the still-dominant post-Heideggerean belief that the era of Western metaphysics is effectively over.
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ItemThe Jew's two noses: Freud, cocaine, addiction( 2001)Recently there have been a number of authorities who - from the inside of psychoanalysis itself - have suggested that the most forceful threat to psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is the present efflorescence and dominance of drug-based psychotherapies. Indeed, the astonishing public success of a physician such as Oliver Sacks - whose entire career would have been impossible without his illegal pharmaceutical experimentation upon uniformed patients in the guise of authentic Hippocratic care - can stand as a particularly chilling index of just such a crisis: the case study, a genre which Freud is often said to have invented, and to which he certainly gave the decisive impetus, has become in Sacks’ hands an unreflective celebration of the radiant sovereign power that legal access to, and distribution rights over, synthesized psychoactive substances can bequeath to the duly-authorised representatives of the pharmaco-medical institution. Sacks aside, John Forrester characterizes this shift thus ;the introduction of the psychotropic drugs in the 1950s, a new generation of tranquilizers shortly after (Librium, Valium), the anti-depressants of the 1960s and 1970s, and the mood-altering drugs of the 1980s, has entailed a significant shift in the practice of psychiatry. Yes, the new psychiatry went hand in hand with a shift of theoretical focus from psychological and psychoanalytical theories to neurological and psychopharmacological concerns’. His analysis has been echoed by other major psychoanalytic theorist-practitioners, such as Bruce Fink, Elie Ragland and Elisabeth Roudinesco, all of whom naturally deplore this situation, even if their condemnations take different forms, and identify different causes.
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ItemOn depression considered as acephalic melancholia( 2003)“Pain and suffering begin with existence and end when it ends, and this end gives pain and suffering to those who survive.” — Jean-Luc Nancy This statement by Nancy opens a subsection of his book entitled “Pain, suffering, unhappiness,”(1977:143) in which the question of art necessarily arises, and arises necessarily because of modern art’s integral link to aesthetics, the science of feeling. Aesthetics, since at least the latter part of the eighteenth century, functions as a theory of the threshold between sense and sensibilia (to cite J.L. Austin), in which the pleasures and pains of a person’s particular body are bound up with a problem of a universal thought that is neither moral nor cognitive. Both passive and active, aesthetic judgements about art become part of the making of art itself, and these aesthetic judgements are ultimately founded in nothing other than pleasure and pain. Everything else is derivative. Yet it is also true that such derivatives are immensely valuable, the indices of a properly human life.
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ItemThe Romanticism of Contemporary Thoery(Ashgate, 2003)
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ItemTowards a secret history of ceramics( 2003-12-01)