Yearly Archives: 2022

By: Paavo Manninen  Abstract: Literary studies have usually interpreted Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1959) to reflect an area void of meaning and inaccessible to representation. The present article, by contrast, argues that Beckett experientially communicates archaic psychic reality where certain contents develop in an interpersonal relationship. The article offers psychoanalytical close readings of a fewContinue reading “Nothing Left but the Core of Murmurs? Attacks on Linking as
Communication in Beckett’s The Unnamable”

By: Marietje Kardaun  Abstract: One of the most unlikely showdowns of world literature is the one between YHWH, creator of heaven and earth, and his humble creature Job. The latter has lost his children, his possessions, and finally his health. He is covered with sore boils and, sitting among the ashes, he tries to cureContinue reading “God’s Own Guinea Pig: The Book of Job and Secularization”

By: Dana Tor Abstract: In 2005, Jean Clair curated a grand exhibition dedicated to melancholy. Theexhibition encompassed an array of the copious representations of melancholythrough a historical prism, and included various spectacular images of skulls, dolefuleyes, ticking clocks and ample images of the posture most identified withmelancholy— figures leaning their heads on their hands. MelancholyContinue reading “The Oresteia and the Act of Revenge: of Desire and Jouissance”

By: Ivett Rozgonyi  Abstract: The expression of autism through a visual medium, the emergence of visual creativity stemmingfrom it, and the exploration of its inherent attributes, can be considered t o be among the lessresearched fields of study. This research aims to investigate the realm of creative autism, with a particular focus on the exceptionalContinue reading ““Soul in a Vase” (Savant Syndrome and Autistic Art)”

By: Elise Denbo  Abstract: This paper opens with Mary Beth Rose’s question, “Where are the mothers in Shakespeare?” Although Shakespeare’s plays often dramatize the emotional bonds between fathers and sons or fathers and daughters, mothers are generally presented as threatening, dangerous, or remarkably absent. Although there are no mothers in As You Like It, embeddedContinue reading “Counting by Threes: Sounding the Maternal in Shakespeare’s As You Like It”

By: Samir Dayal  Abstract: This special issue on Lacanian Perspectives, guest-edited by Jerry Aline Flieger, is focused on aspects of the work of Jacques Lacan, who famously elaborated on the nature of the Freudian Thing—la chose freudienne. Recently there has been a resurgent theoretical interest in ”things”—reflecting a variety of approaches ranging from a focusContinue reading “Editorial Introduction by Samir Dayal: Special Issue on Lacanian Perspectives (Guest Editor, Jerry Aline Flieger)”

By: Robert Silhol  Abstract: What is, for psychoanalysis, in 1975, a subject ? Such is the question asked by Jacques Lacan at the opening of his weekly “seminar,” a question to which for a year, 1975-1976, that is to say for ten one and a half hour sessions, he will attempt to give an answer.Continue reading “How to Make Sense of Lacan’s Rings and Straight Lines.”

By: Virginia Blum and Anna Secor  Abstract: Authors’ note: Our contribution to this Lacanian issue of Psyart intends not to foreground a specifically Lacanian reading of our film examples, but rather to serve as an example of how Lacan’s highly topological theory may be integrated in the larger field ofpsychoanalytic discourse, both because his topologiesContinue reading “Psychic Space as the Structure of Unconscious Fantasy”

By: Gautam Basu Thakur  Abstract: In the climactic scene from the film The Great Debaters (2007), James L. Framer Jr. (Denzel Whitaker), speaking for the motion “Resolved: Civil Disobedience is a Moral weapon in the fight for Justice,” rebuts the opponent team from Harvard University and clinches a win for his team, Wiley College, withContinue reading ““You Should Pray I Choose the Latter”: Rioting, Violence, & Jouissance”

By: Alexander Venetis  Abstract: The notion of the subject as conceived by Jacques Lacan should not be conflatedwith the subject as conceived by linguists or philosophers or other academic theorists concerned with this notion. For Lacan, the subject is empty, meaning that it neither pertains to relationality nor to positivity. Neither a positive determination canContinue reading “The Subject as Contradiction: Atomicity, the Void & the Aesthetic Experience”