Jeffrey Librett

_Provides the foundations for a new form of psychoanalysis appropriate to the subject of the twenty-first century._ _A Psychoanalysis for a Reemergent Humanity_ presents and elaborates upon the mature thought of the Haitian-Quebecois analyst Willy Apollon. Apollon's work amounts to a thorough revision of the fundamental concepts of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis in view of the situation of the human subject today, in an age of global cultural conflict and interpenetration that he calls "mondialisation." This landmark volume brings together a new foundational text by Apollon, seven original essays, including by Apollon's longtime collaborators Danielle Bergeron and volume coeditor Lucie Cantin, and an interview with Apollon. Synthesizing clinical, cultural-historical, and aesthetic perspectives, contributors offer rich redefinitions of the unconscious, the imaginary-symbolic-real triad, masculine and feminine, puberty and adolescence, address and transference, the symptom, the fantasy, and more. As distinct cultures and civilizations crumble, the world as a whole and the human emerge in a new way. _A Psychoanalysis for a Reemergent Humanity_ meets this moment, positioning spirit as a crucial term for a human creativity that exceeds any given culture.

I perform a gender-theoretical, rhetorically-informed reading of the eighteenth- to nineteenth-century discourse on the grounding of the "beautiful soul" as self-grounding subject-objectivity. I re- and de-construct the operations of this grounding--in Shaftesbury, Kant, and Hegel--at the moment when the "beautiful soul," delegitimated by secularization, answers with an emphatic denegation. I interpret the claim to grounding in: reason , nature , and conviction . ;In Part I, I contrast Shaftesbury's and Kant's groundings of the "beautiful soul" in reason qua sensus communis. In Part II, I contrast their groundings of the "beautiful soul" in nature. In each contrast, Shaftesbury employs rhapsodic, popular, or literary form; Kant employs architectonic, scholastic, or philosophic form. Shaftesbury's form is that of nature, Kant's that of reason. The contrast between the two forms introduces the difference between reason and nature within both reason and nature, renders impure on the level of form what has purified itself of its other on the level of content. ;The passage from Part II to Part III, from nature as ground to conviction as ground, is based on Shaftesbury's and Kant's grounding of nature in the mode of conviction appropriate to the conscious experience of such nature. In Part III, I read Hegel's historico-philosophically convincing and convicting reduction of rational-natural totality--"conscience"--to pure self-conviction. The pure, self-reflexive Uberzeugung as which conscience is convoked amounts to a supra-rational, supra-natural, excessive- or over-engenderment no longer assimilable to a restricted economy. The dialectic of forgiveness does not overcome this excess but affirms its ubiquity as the impossibility of any subject-object totality. I juxtapose here Heidegger's reading of Hegel as a subjectivist with my reading of Hegel as rhetorician. This juxtaposition allows, contra Heidegger, for the rapprochement of Hegel's concept of conviction and Heidegger's concept of aletheia. I conclude with a brief exposition of Lacan on the "beautiful soul" as paranoid ego

"What is whole on earth? … [D]oesn't this building of the times upon each other make the whole of our species into a formless monstrous structure [zum unförmlichen Riesengebäude], where one carries away what another began to build, where what never should have been built remains standing and in centuries finally everything becomes One Ruin [Ein Schutt], amongst which, the more broken and crumbling it is, the more confidently the hesitating people live?" "Johann Gottfried Herder, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit1"With the subordination of Church to State introduced by the principle of “cuius…

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of TestimonyGiorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of MetaphysicsJeffrey S. Librett (bio)By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting.—Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”Can there be a discourse that, without being a metalanguage or sinking into the unsayable, says language itself and exposes its limits?—Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language”I shall not rest until every German sees that it is a shameful thing to be a lawyer.—Adolf Hitler, speech before theReichstag, April 26, 1942From his early works on, Giorgio Agamben has opposed the thought of no contemporary philosopher more consistently and programmatically than that of Jacques Derrida, whose questioning of phonocentric metaphysics Agamben has tried to replace by a characterization of metaphysics as (what I am calling here) graphocentric. To go back behind the replacement of the voice by the letter is for Agamben to recover the event of language itself, the taking-place of language as Being.1 In his conceptualization of the project for such a recovery, as we shall see, Agamben’s commitment to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined by his investment in the Christian God as logos.This philosophical program in Agamben’s early essays guides his later work on the homo sacer-sovereign relation but also distorts and disturbs the later work in three principal ways. First, it prompts him to propose an exclusively juridicopolitical understanding of the sacredness of the homo sacer, effectively scapegoating the juridical sphere for a more broadly theopolitical problem, while placing the specifically Christian background [End Page 11] of his antinomianism in a misleadingly secular, rational, and universalist light. Symptomatically, in order to accomplish this juridicopolitical reduction Agamben must reject Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice—along with the entire modern anthropological reading of the sacred—out of hand. For this rejection protects his discourse against any sustained confrontation with the importance of the sacrificial dimension for both what he calls the homo sacer and his own approach to law in his theorization of the homo sacer..Second, Agamben’s philosophical program impoverishes the account he provides of the Nazi death camps as an extreme example of the sovereign-homo sacer relation by making it impossible for him to appreciate the importance of Christian antinomianism in the formation of National Socialist ideology. For Agamben’s philosophical orientation requires or presupposes that he ignore or underestimate, first of all, the sacrificially anti-Semitic dimension of Christian antinomianism—the tendency of such antinomianism to make Judaism responsible for the ontological desert into which representation exiles us all. Further, as a consequence of his continuing commitment to this tradition, Agamben cannot see how important the tradition remains, even if in a displaced form, for Nazi anti-Semitism. I argue that Agamben’s animus against the letter blinds him to the Christian and sacrificial dimensions of the Holocaust—he ignores the former and explicitly, emphatically denies the latter dimension—because this animus represents his own commitment to the Christian antinomianism that, in its racialized National Socialist form, attempts to rid itself of the letter by sacrificing not only Judaism but the (biologically, racially construed) Jews. Because his radically antinomian program would become unsettled by his recognition of its important overlap with the ideological bases of National Socialism, Agamben cannot ultimately acknowledge the Christian and sacrificial aspects of the Holocaust.Finally, in Remnants of Auschwitz—his main reading (outside of Homo Sacer) of the significance of the Nazi death camps—Agamben positions “testimony” as the exemplary instance of the speaking of speech, the taking-place of language. The result of the destruction of European Jewry becomes here the revelation of poetic speech as a manifestation of the absolute. Unwittingly, Agamben ends up participating in...

In this groundbreaking work, the author effects the first extended rhetorical-philosophical reading of the historically problematic relationship between Jews and Germans, based on an analysis of texts from the Enlightenment through Modernism by Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Karl Marx, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. The theoretical underpinning of the work lies in the author’s rereading, in terms of contemporary rhetorical theory, of the medieval tradition known as “figural representation,” which defines the Jewish-Christian relation as that between the dead, prefigural letter and the living, fulfilled spirit. After arguing that the German Enlightenment ultimately plays out the historical phantasm of a necessary “Judaization” of Protestant rationality, the author shows that German Early Romanticism consists fundamentally in the attempt to solve the aporias raised by this impossible confrontation between Protestant spirit and Jewish letter. In readings of Dorothea Schlegel—Mendelssohn’s daughter—and her husband Friedrich Schlegel, the author provides a new interpretation of the Neo-Catholic turn of later German Romanticism. Further, he situates the proleptic end and reversal of the project of Jewish emancipation in the two extreme versions of late-nineteenth-century anti-Judaism, those of Marx and Wagner, here viewed as binary concretizations of a specifically post-Romantic paganized Protestantism. Finally, the author argues that twentieth-century Modernism as represented by Nietzsche and Freud renews, if in a multiply ironic displacement, the secret “Judaizing” tendencies of the Enlightenment. Fascism and Communism both denigrate this Modernism, which affirms the letter of language as quasi-synonymous with the force of temporality—or anticipatory repetition—that disrupts all claims to the full presence of spirit. The book ends with a note on recent debates about Holocaust memory.