The following is the second part in a three-part installment. The first part can be found here. The Symbolic Lacan: Signifiance of Texts There are certain key écrits [1] from the 1950s that in effect fully announce Lacan’s entry into his so-called “structuralist phase.” Academically speaking, this Lacan is the most well-known of our three Lacans […]
Year: 2019
Thinking With One’s Feet – Lacanian Theories Of Textual Engagement, Part 1 (William J. Urban)
The following is the first part in a three-part installment. Introduction In 1975, Jacques Lacan travelled to the United States to deliver a series of lectures and made a memorable stop in Boston to speak to a distinguished audience of mathematicians, linguists and philosophers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was there he first […]
Review – Performance Apophatics (John Matthew Allison)
Claire Maria Chambers. Performance Studies and Negative Epistemology: Performance Apophatics. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hardback. 301 pages. Performance Studies and Negative Epistemology: Performance Apophatics (hereafter Performance Studies) is a book about the limits of knowledge. Drawing upon a variety of fields – including performance studies, Christian negative theology, and assorted schools of Continental philosophy – Claire […]
The Silent Space Of The Vacuum (Jonathan P. Morgan)
Many kinds of structures seem ubiquitous and essential for the kind of meaning humanity concerns itself with. Lévi-Strauss’ early work on myth and kinship are two significant examples with the influence of each visible in much of our daily existence. Still, we must ask, can structures of this sort be universal? How do we avoid […]
Embodiment And The Experience Of The Divine (James Mensch)
At the outset of Genesis, we are presented with two different pictures of God. The first depicts God as the creator of the world and, thus, as transcendent to it. This implies that we cannot understand his creative action in worldly terms. If, for example, we say that “in the beginning” God caused the world […]
If You Have To Explain It, It Isn’t Funny – Laughing Immediately With Merleau-Ponty, Part 2 (Adam Blair)
This the second part of a two-part series. The first part can be found here. Merleau-Ponty wants to avoid the division of latent and manifest content, instead pointing to the inability to speak as a simple, unified condition. Both the shock of the earthquake and the maternal prohibition caused a refusal of coexistence on the part of […]
If You Have To Explain It, It Isn’t Funny – Laughing Immediately With Merleau-Ponty, Part 1 (Adam Blair)
This is the first section in a two-part series. The three predominant theories of humor within the Western canon — relief, incongruity, and superiority— reveal something about why we laugh when we do. There is a central insight to each of the three theories, regarding the psychological, conceptual, and social forces at play in our experience of […]