From the editors' introduction: Refusing to oppose truth to semblance, psychoanalysis models its utterances on their alliance. If Freud creates a number of 'scientific' myths that continue to elicit derisive laughter from modern psychologists - Oedipus, the primal father - it is for no other reason than that psychoanalysis emerges at the point where this repressed myth must return in the guise of rationalism itself in order to combat the fierce dialectic of obscurantism and rational atheism... Rather than unmasking the deception of the signifier, psychoanalysis produces this deception in its emptiness, indirectly revealing its semblance and separating off its illusory mystifications without sacrificing the singular jouissance it marks... Far from distancing itself from semblance, by making it into an everyday object against which one can do battle, psychoanalysis should maintain the possibility that this semblance of being might be our only chance to decide, to intervene politically.

Umbr(a): Semblance

Catherine Malabou

Henry Corbin

Russell Grigg

Kōjin Karatani

Joan Copjec

Jelica Sumic

Gerard Wacjman

Bernard Baas

Oliver Feltham

The Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture

We maintain that the invention of psychoanalysis discovers its true specificity at the precise point when Freud, having listened well to the appeals of his analysand, refuses to concern himself with making her 'happy again,' with recalibrating her relation to reality so as to help her finally achieve her 'full potential.' We can read this specificity at the outset, in Freud s early Studies on Hysteria, which concludes with these words of 'encouragement' to the analysand: 'Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.' One might say - and this would be to say nearly the same thing - that psychoanalysis arrives at the domain proper to it (and only it) when Freud, rather than respond to his patient's demand to simply get rid of her suffering - to excise, annihilate, or at least cauterize the symptom that stands between her and the world in which she recalls she once took so much satisfaction - instead allies himself to her symptom, positions himself as its oblique addressee. In so doing, Freud absents psychoanalysis once and for all from the normalizing schema of 'therapy,' a schema oriented toward the elimination of what is beyond the pleasure principle - today we call this orientation 'biopower' - and makes of it a practice oriented toward the subject's construction of a knowledge about the jouissance which alone marks her singularity. The promise of psychoanalysis, then, is neither personal happiness nor a happy return to the shared norms of the social field, but the articulation of a singular truth that opens up for the subject a horizon for creative action.

Umbr(a): Utopia

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

Etienne Balibar

Joseph Jenkins

Juliet Flower MacCannell

Danielle Bergeron

Adrian Johnston

Felix Ensslin

<p>Regarding the questions raised by the current conflicts troubling our relations with various parts of the Islamic world, the premise of this special issue is that psychoanalysis offers a unique, powerful and even necessary approach. We anticipate that certain historicists and culturalists will protests that the discourse of psychoanalysis is entirely inappropriate to this task, that its categories for analyzing or rendering transparent the Arab mind cannot be transported to foreign soil and that the bid of do so is just another example of the West s ambition to Occidentalize the world, to market its franchise worldwide.... To contest these charges which, aimed at a straw science, miss their mark we will propose for psychoanalysis a different adjective, one that will help less to qualify than to de-qualify our de-regionalize it; psychoanalysis is, we suggest, an exotic science. In physics the existence of an exotic force accounts for the phenomenon in which objects that are close are pushed slightly away from each other. Psychoanalysis is that science devoted to studying the exotic force that operates in the subject to push her from herself, opening a margin of separation between her and parts of herself she will never be able to assimilate. The existence of this force is an unsimple fact with ramifying consequences for the conception of the subject and her relations with others....</p>

Umbr(a): Islam

Fethi Benslama

Christian Jambet

Joseph Massad

Stephania Pandolfo

Moustafa Safouan

Alberto Toscano

Nathan Gorelick

Lydia R. Kerr

<p>Product Description      The present issue of Umbr(a) aims to provide a space for the elaboration of the often-uninterrogated relation between writing and psychoanalysis. For, inasmuch as psychoanalysis is inextricably linked to the speaking subject, it nevertheless finds its origins and future firmly grounded in writing. Every psychoanalyst whose training is informed by Freud's writing, every psychoanalytic critic who takes writing as his object of study, and anyone in any discipline who reads or writes in the name of psychoanalysis must eventually account for the following -- deceptively simple -- question: If psychoanalysis can rightly be called the talking cure, then why should it have anything at all to say about writing? The answer to this question will dictate not only why psychoanalysis can be brought to bear upon the question of writing -- what, for example, characterizes writing as distinct from speech or even the mark -- but also what psychoanalysis enables one to think about writing, as distinct from any other possible discipline, method, or apparatus. Or, to put it another way, when choosing to bring the concepts, structures, and operations of psychoanalysis to bear upon writing, one must be prepared to account not only for the choice of psychoanalysis -- Why psychoanalysis? -- but also for the admissibility and relevance of the object -- Why writing? Indeed, if there is anything that makes psychoanalysis today uniquely situated to approach the question of writing it is the way in which it inherits -- in a structurally irrevocable way -- the distinction between speech and writing. Writing has been fundamentally, but almost paradoxically, implicated in psychoanalysis from the very outset. Freud became convinced of the existence of the unconscious through direct and repeated experience of its manifestations in the speech and acts of his analysands. However, in order for his singular discovery to be useful and convincing to others who had not had the benefit of direct experience he was compelled to write. This point cannot be emphasized enough: Psychoanalysis, as it exists today, is a direct consequence of the manner in which Freud translated and transmitted his clinical experience through the fundamentally incompatible register of writing. In his case histories, for example, Freud makes it abundantly clear that what he has written is by no means a wholly accurate or linear representation of the course of the analysis in question. What the reader experiences will not be identical to what Freud experienced. Yet Freud nevertheless writes with the expectation of producing the same effect in his reader: a repetition of his inaugural experience of the unconscious. As readers of Freud, we inherit a very specific relation to repetition, and that repetition cannot be unbound from the writing of which it is a consequence. In this sense, Freud's writing has served, and continues to serve, as the base case for a peculiar sort of mathematical induction. Every reader must repeat the discovery of the unconscious and reinvent psychoanalysis, as if for the first time, while being constrained by nothing but the economy of Freud's writing. This is the Freudian wager: that the psychoanalysis we invent by reading what he has written will be, somehow, the same psychoanalysis.      About the Author      LUCIE CANTIN is a psychoanalyst, psychologist, and co-director of training at Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles (GIFRIC) in Québec. She has published numerous texts on a wide variety of psychoanalytic topics. In English, she has published (with Willy Apollon and Danielle Bergeron) After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (State University of New York Press, 2002). SIGI JÖTTKANDT is a lecturer in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in Australia. She is the co-founder (with Dominiek Hoens) of S: Journal of the Jan van Eyck Circle</p>

Umbr(a): Writing

Pierre Klossowski

Alenka Zupančič

Jean-Michel Rabaté

Sigi Jöttkandt

Lucie Cantin

Tracy McNulty

Catherine Millot

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