Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy
- 1 Listening or Dispensing? Sigmund Freud on Drugs
- 2 Love as Ontology; or, Psychoanalysis against Philosophy
- 3 Revolution or Subversion? Jacques Lacan on Slavery
- 4 Messianism or Melancholia? Giorgio Agamben on Inaction
- 5 The Slave, The Fable
- 6 Torture, Psychoanalysis and Beyond
- 7 Man is a Swarm Animal
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Messianism or Melancholia? Giorgio Agamben on Inaction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy
- 1 Listening or Dispensing? Sigmund Freud on Drugs
- 2 Love as Ontology; or, Psychoanalysis against Philosophy
- 3 Revolution or Subversion? Jacques Lacan on Slavery
- 4 Messianism or Melancholia? Giorgio Agamben on Inaction
- 5 The Slave, The Fable
- 6 Torture, Psychoanalysis and Beyond
- 7 Man is a Swarm Animal
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Hence loathèd Melancholy
Of Cerberus, and blackest Midnight born,
In Stygian cave forlorn
‘Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy,
Find out some uncouth cell,
Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings,
And the night-raven sings;
There under ebon shades, and low-browed rocks,
As ragged as thy locks,
In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell.
John Milton, L'AllegroHence vain deluding joys,
The brood of folly without father bred,
How little you bestead,
Or fill the fixèd mind with all your toys;
Dwell in some idle brain,
And fancies fond with gaudy shapes possess,
Or likest hovering dreams
The fickle pensioners of Morpheus’ train.
But hail thou goddess, sage and holy,
Hail divinest Melancholy,
Whose saintly visage is too bright
To hit the sense of human sight;
And therefore to our weaker view,
O'erlaid with black staid wisdom's hue.
John Milton, Il PenserosoAGAMBEN'S PASSAGE THROUGH ANTIPHILOSOPHY
In the preceding chapters, I tried to show how psychoanalysis emerged as an antiphilosophy and, in this emergence, came to establish certain routines as its own: the diagnosis of slavery as the consequence of the encounter between the body and language, a concomitant intrication of sexual protest, the ambivalence of love as at once mediating, obscuring and transforming this relation between slavery and sex, and, finally, the development of an ethics of poetic invention. This chapter, by contrast, turns its attentions to a different kind of thinker: one who begins as a self-nominated ‘philosopher’, but who, in covertly drawing from the antiphilosophical powers of psychoanalysis, recovers and remarks phenomena that much contemporary philosophy had felt itself able to overlook; these phenomena include the Muselmann, the potentiality of poetry, and a practical theorisation of study in which stupefaction and stupidity become avatars of messianism.
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- Information
- Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy , pp. 84 - 101Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013