WHY ANTIPHILOSOPHY?

Psychoanalysis is an antiphilosophy. Despite the precision of this concept and this claim, their implications remain controversial. This book thus introduces the concept of antiphilosophy, speaks of its constitution and pertinence with respect to psychoanalysis, and examines the consequences of such a determination through a sequence of case-studies. Although the concept has some highly abstract aspects and a somewhat forbidding intellectual history, it is deployed here, first, as a kind of corrosive of received ideas, and, second, as an affirmative means of characterising psychoanalysis that captures something essential, if often elided, about the peculiar status of the practice.

‘Antiphilosophy’ is, as the most cursory research reveals, a word in common use. It is for the most part deployed to designate an intellectual hostility – that is, a hostility within thought itself – to ‘philosophy’ more or less broadly conceived. Hence one finds accounts of how this or that religious thinker or theologian, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Islamic or what have you, self-consciously arrays their thought against the propositions and methods of philosophy. According to this general, essentially religious acceptation, philosophy is constitutively incapable of thinking what is most crucial, above all, the revealed truths of this or that religion or ethical practice.