Posted inEqualityGender violenceGeneralHealthMedia

Criminality of the brutal variety

By the term, ‘criminality’, I don’t simply mean the perpetration of crime, or criminal acts; I have in mind something far more fundamental, even primal, in the sense of that which remains behind when criminologists, sociologists, psychologists and psychiatrists have exhausted all avenues of causal explanation when it comes to the ‘grounds’ or causal antecedents […]

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Lacan and Fowles on human knowledge

When I first read John Fowles’ wonderful counter-Bildung novel, The Magus, years ago, I had not read Jacques Lacan. When I finally did try to make sense of Lacan, after reading Freud, something Lacan says made me think back to The Magus. In The Other side of Psychoanalysis (2007: 23), Lacan makes this observation: “The […]

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What Lacan can teach us about capitalism

Jacques Lacan’s theory of discourse is every bit as heuristically powerful as Michel Foucault’s, and in some respects more sophisticated and subtle, although the two theories are compatible. Broadly speaking, Foucault thinks of discourse as language in so far as it bears the imprint of (conflicting) interests – which means that discourse is inseparable from […]