This paper examines the evolution of Jacques Lacan’s concept of mourning from his treatment of Hamlet in Seminar 6, “Desire and Its Interpretation,” to its transformation in the tenth Seminar on “Anxiety.” It is a transformation that occurs in tandem with Lacan’s reconception of anxiety as lack of the lack and his reshaped conception of the objet a as object/cause of desire. The key point is the way that Lacan’s renovated conception upends the common sense notion of mourning, that which (...) assumes that suffering the death of a loved one means accommodating oneself to an absence where there was previously a presence. On the contrary, says Lacan, part of what is most deeply to be mourned is the lack in the Other around which the love relation was constructed. The paper concludes by asking to what extent Lacan’s account of mourning should be distinguished from those of both Hegel and Freud. (shrink)

Anxiety and hysteria proliferate in contemporary postcolonial, post-apartheid South Africa, where it is always intimately related to the question of the Law and, specifically ‘the Constitution’. I begin by tracing Freud’s discussions of the co-occurrence of anxiety with hysteria, after which I consider Lacan’s unique account of anxiety as the ‘lack of the support of the lack’. I continue to offer a re-interpretation of the Master’s discourse, namely as a discourse that in its very structure exposes the subject to the (...) production of the object of anxiety. I then consider two possible ways in which anxiety may affect the discourse of the Hysteric: acting out and the passage à l’acte. I conclude that Lacan’s shorthand for the relationship between the Hysteric and the Master is also an accurate description of the present moment in the postcolony: ‘she reigns and he does not govern’. (shrink)

From the 1990s, during and after the post-communist transitions in Eastern Europe, different self-help texts advancing spiritual or personal well-being continue to be a highly popular discourse in Slovenia. In this article we examine the appropriation of self-help discourse in one of Slovenia's most influential management magazines, Manager. On the basis of a critical discourse analysis of Manager's articles, we argue that the magazine predominantly uses spiritual self-help vocabulary and accordingly transforms definitions of basic business vocabulary. It offers a spiritual (...) self-growth discourse as a solution to any current management or social problems and in doing so supports the liberal capitalism. This discourse attempts to advise managers as to how to adapt to the new competitive business environment. It furthermore promotes the belief that solely spiritual self-growth will help managers and their business partners to resist political and economic barriers and assure the business success in times of global corporate `survival'. (shrink)

In colonial nations, such as the land called Australia, the two registers of settler and Indigenous jurisdictions compete at the level of symbolic certainty. In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory neither can arrive at perfect symbolisation but the struggle and the proximity to their arrival can evoke anxiety. What insists to keep this anxiety at bay, in non-Indigenous Australia, is what Jacques Derrida calls justice. As an impossible object, similar to the Lacanian object petit a, justice must be interminably animated to hold (...) this object of desire in play. Humiliation of Indigenous people in Australia is, I argue in this article, one mode of this play. I interrogate the psychoanalytic discussions of anxiety by Freud and Lacan to consider firstly what might be the cause of anxiety for contemporary non-Indigenous Australians and secondly how this anxiety is ‘played out’ on the bodies of Indigenous people through practices of humiliation. As one example of this work of humiliation I consider several scenes of police practice in the Sydney suburb of ‘Redfern’ from the 1991 documentary Cop it Sweet. (shrink)

Freezing is a common sign of panic, a response to accidents or events that overflow our capacity to react. Just as all civil airspace was cleared after the 9/11 attacks, the US-Canada border was also frozen, causing economic slowdowns. Border policies are caught between these two panics: security failures and economic crisis. To escape this paradox, American and Canadian authorities have implemented a series of security measures to make the border ‘smarter’, notably the implementation of biometric identity documents and surveillance (...) by UAV Predator drones. Psychoanalytic theory can help us explain why the Canadian and American governments have invested so much money for so little evident or measurable increase in either security or economic flows. The article uses the notion of phantastic objects to explain these (over-)reactions to risk management at the US-Canada border. (shrink)

In this article a reference to Jacques Lacan’s ‘capitalist discourse’ will help highlight the bio-political workings of neo-liberalism in times of austerity, detecting the transition from so-called ‘debt economy’ to an ‘economy of anxiety.’ An ‘il-liberal’ turn at the core of neoliberal discourses will be examined in particular, which pivots on an ‘astute’ intersecting between outbursts of renunciation; irreducible circularity of guilt and satisfaction; persistent attachment to forms of dissipative enjoyment; and a pervasive blackmail under the register of all-encompassing regulations (...) and evaluations — all of which elevates the production of success up to the point of a production and consumption of failure. (shrink)

Since the financial crisis of 2008 we have seen a rise in suicides across the world. Greece for example in 2011 saw a sustained increase in suicides of 35.7%. In this article I draw our attention to well-publicized suicides that took place in Greece. I focus on the suicide notes left behind. The suicide notes, I suggest, can be read as offering us a critique of the anxious times in which we find ourselves. They are offering us a critique in (...) two senses: a critique of the way we are being governed ; and a critique of the affirmative ways of responding towards the financial crisis. Consequently these suicide notes can be read as a demand for having a break from this neoliberal logic and organization of life and asking us to re-imagine our social and political realm. In arguing thus, the article draws on Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Wendy Brown and others. (shrink)

Diverse meanings of ‘sovereignty’ and ‘exchange’ force us to interrogate the implicit ontology of states and the associated assumptions about will, matter and spirit used by political theorists, evoking different religious and political traditions. This article contrasts the notion of ‘sovereignty’ found in Joseph Tonda’s Le Souverain Moderne with the one found in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire. Tonda’s text, I argue, challenges and complicates the appropriateness of referring to early Christianity as a model for resistance to global capitalism (...) in Empire. To help with this contrast, I draw on two Central African authors, Emmanuel Dongala and Joseph Mwantuali, whose novels illustrate the supernatural as well as thoroughly material significance of state power, wealth and sexuality in the modern Sovereign. (shrink)

In this article we examine the self-help discourses in Slovene President Drnovsek's blog, which he uses as the main tool to communicate with the Slovene public. On the basis of a critical discourse analysis of Drnovsek's writings, we argue that Drnovsek recontextualises Slovene political discourse and replaces it with a particular type of therapeutic discourse. We explore Drnovsek's self-help discourse as a way of approaching some issues associated with the ‘post-socialist’ condition. We suggest that his discourse attempts to direct citizens (...) towards a ‘proper’ understanding of the social changes caused by the collapse of socialism and the rise of liberalism. Furthermore, his discourse advises the citizens how to ‘empower’ themselves during insecure economic times. (shrink)

: Through its would-be extrication from education, fear just gets forced into a less detectable and hence more efficacious modus operandi characteristic of anxiety and deep boredom. Since proscribing fear protects students not against the danger it foreshadows but against acknowledging the existence thereof, a conditional acceptance of it might empower them to manage their lives superlatively. Being only bureaucratically objective when conveying threats to their future, as schools do, is a limitation imposed upon a more responsible, deeper-level intersubjective involvement (...) to which fear holds the key. Schools are best placed for attempting to restore the public management of ‘individual’ fears. (shrink)