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
3 - Revolution or Subversion? Jacques Lacan on Slavery
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
It is claimed that self-interest will prevent excessive cruelty; as if self-interest protected our domestic animals, which are far less likely than degraded slaves, to stir up the rage of their savage masters.
Charles DarwinThe specific hue which nobility had in the ancient world is absent in ours because the ancient slave is absent from our sensibility … The Greek philosopher went through life feeling secretly that there were far more slaves than one might think – namely, that everyone who was not a philosopher was a slave; his pride overflowed when he considered that even the mightiest men on earth might be his slaves.
Friedrich NietzscheThe previous chapters pinpointed a new form of the ancient relationship between ‘slavery’ and ‘alienation’ emerging at the origins of psychoanalysis in the form of the relationship between drug-addiction and sexuality. The first chapter also showed how this emergence was coterminous with Freud's forced transition from scientific experimentation to linguistic interlocution; that is, it entailed Freud's departure from a strictly scientific field and directed him into situations that, while never abandoning a guiding ideal of science, required supplementation by the extra-scientific armature derived from a form of attentiveness to ‘literature’. In terms of the ‘therapy’ offered by psychoanalysis, this required – as the subsequent history of psychoanalysis testifies – a shift from the pharmacological dosing of patients by state-ratified medical experts to the free associations of lay analysis.
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- Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy , pp. 63 - 83Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013