It is common for clinicians working in psychiatry and related clinical disciplines to be called on to make diagnostic clinical judgments concerning moral anxiety, which is a kind of anxiety that is closely bound up with decisions individuals face as moral agents. To make such a judgment, it is necessary to make a moral judgment. Although it has been common to acknowledge that there are ways in which moral and clinical judgment interact, this type of interaction has remained unacknowledged. This (...) raises questions as to the nature and limits of psychiatry—particularly concerning the extent to which psychiatric discourse ought to incorporate moral discourse, and the role of the clinician as an expert in identifying problematic anxiety. (shrink)

This article argues that the example of laughter continues to trouble the human/machine binary that so many have troubled, from Descartes to Zupančič. Sounding various objects of “recorded” laughter through psychoanalytic tweeters, deconstructive warps, and object-oriented woofers implicates ontology as so much noise for the projection of certainty. Derivatively speaking, I argue for the primacy of a rhetorical ethics.

Homi Bhabha's attempts to recuperate Frantz Fanon's “black man” as a figure of resistance and subversion have relied on the simple fact of this figure's existence: because the black man's identity is irrevocably divided, Bhabha claims that its mere existence calls the unity of a normative identity into question. This essay broadly questions Bhabha's reading of Fanon by asking exactly how it is that the subject's potential for subversion can be realized in action, and suggests – drawing from Jacques Lacan's (...) work as well from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre – a new model for the figure of Fanon's black man which retains the possibility for a free subjectivity oriented toward resistance. The tacit belief that resistance must arise as a consciously developed response is belied by the suggestion that there are psychic tensions that might produce a subversive subjective orientation involuntarily, spontaneously. (shrink)

The critical commentary on Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative focuses primarily on her use of speech-act theory for political purposes. Admitting the limitations of Austin’s work, she introduces an extended supplement to her linguistically based performative theory in Excitable Speech: a discussion of embodied subjectivity presented in ways never before instanced in her work. That is, in this text, she continues to use speech-act theory articulated with Derridean iterability (her usual practice) to ground performativity, while presenting (...) a version of embodiment newly derived from psychoanalysis to establish the political efficacy of the subject. Although this shift has gone unremarked in the literature, Butler herself treats this psychoanalytic dimension as animating the entire argument. This article reviews her logic and the place that psychoanalysis holds in her theory to establish the viability of the embodied political performative and its utility for historicism. (shrink)

This article proposes that Deleuze’s psychoanalytically inspired theory of humour and irony provides an underappreciated way to theorize acts of resistance that adopt a structurally perverse position towards a law or authority. In his books Coldness and Cruelty and Difference and Repetition, Deleuze explains that the law is susceptible to two kinds of subversive procedure. The first, which he calls irony and which he aligns with sadism, reveals a gap between the law and its principles. The second, which he calls (...) humour and which he aligns with masochism, exposes a gap between the law’s interdictions and their consequences. For Deleuze, humour and irony harbour the potential to overturn or overthrow the law. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and contemporary examples – alt-right ‘free speech’ demonstrations in the United States and protests surrounding Russia’ s 2012 parliamentary elections – the article argues that Deleuze overstates the transformative potential of perversion. Nevertheless, his account remains useful for showing the circuitous routes that some subjects take to enjoy their position within the law. Given the global rise in right-wing authoritarianism in recent years, this may prove to be an important insight. (shrink)

In Letter 5.8 Pliny shows that in the post-Domitianic era historia has become an impossible genre, both as a vehicle for conventional moral wisdom and because of the authoritative narrative voice it necessitates. The letter's literary strategies of deferral express these problems even as its content appears to argue positively the merits of historia and compare it with those of oratio. Pliny emphasizes the insufficiency of the narrative “I”, suggesting instead the importance of dialogue as the means both toward the (...) ethical reconstruction of post-tyrannical discourse and the literary fame for which Pliny also hopes. (shrink)