•  4
    ‘Subject van zijn daden’: Lacaniaanse reflecties bij een foucaultiaanse levenskunst
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 115 (1): 87-99. 2023.
    ‘Subject of one’s acts’: Lacanian reflections on a Foucauldian art of living In Les aveux de la chair, the fourth volume of his Histoire de la sexualité, Foucault explains how the still dominant idea that man is ‘subject of desire’ – and thus subjected to the law of desire – has its origin in the libido theory of Augustine. With this genealogical analysis Foucault targets, among other things, the libido theory of his contemporary, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. This essay briefly discusses wha…Read more
  •  5
    Stadhouden
    de Uil Van Minerva 35 (3). 2023.
  •  11
    A Sleepless Dream
    ThéoRèmes 10 (1). 2017.
    Religion plays a crucial role in the critical dimension of Pasolini’s movies. Yet the religion performed there is a thoroughly ‘pagan’ religion, a religion that is itself not critical at all. The question to be raised is why Pasolini does not refer to the ‘monotheistic’ kind of religion, which is critical – and even religion critical – in its core. The article tries to develop an answer to that question by means of patient and profound reflection upon Pasolini’s definition of ‘God’ as “a dream t…Read more
  •  2
    Love as Political Concept
    Philosophy, Culture, and Traditions 9 87-104. 2013.
  •  3
    Singulier metafysisch
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 106 (4): 303-309. 2014.
    Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
  •  4
    Visual art owes its modernity from the crisis it fell into in the midst of the nineteenth century. Courbet’s call for realism questioned the foundation of the art of his time. The incapacity of the series of ‘-isms’ that followed to answer Courbet’s call, pointed to a crisis not only in art, but in the then emerging non-artistic visual culture in general. In fact, Courbet’s call questioned the image paradigm that was in force since the Renaissance: the one of ‘representation’. The crisis of art …Read more
  •  81
    Agamben’s thought gives us an interesting set of tools and references to critically analyse the logic of sovereignty haunting even the best intentions of Western biopolitics. As an alternative to the inherently disastrous logic of inclusive exclusion, he puts forward a strong vitalist, ontological way of thinking. This paper is an enquiry into whether that alternative is really valid. As far as his publications allow, the answer to this question must be negative. A careful reading of the passage…Read more
  •  9
    The Documentary Real and the Shoah
    Foundations of Science 23 (2): 245-254. 2018.
    Without the support of imagination, one would not have the slightest idea of the cruel ‘real’ that has occurred in the Nazi extermination camps. Yet, in documentaries imaging the events of the Shoah, one runs the risk of missing their most basic property, namely their unimaginability. The mere idea that one is able to imagine the unimaginable comes down to a denial of the Shoah’s status as an event that defies our understanding. The unimaginable ‘real’ of the Shoah, however, is not simply locate…Read more
  •  26
    Selfless love: Pur Amour in Fénelon and Malebranche
    International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 78 (1-2): 75-90. 2017.
    ABSTRACTIn the seventeenth century, when the modern Self emerged in the shape of a self-assured Cartesian cogito, a radically opposite movement of ‘emptying’ or ‘deconstructing’ that Self took place. The religious subject, having become modern, understood its ultimate aim as becoming selfless. The battlefield on which the new subject fought the fight with its own modern condition was the issue of ‘love’. ‘What is the status of his Self when it is involved in the act of love?’ was the central que…Read more
  •  140
    Act without denial: Slavoj žižek on totalitarianism, revolution and political act
    Studies in East European Thought 56 (4): 299-334. 2004.
    iek's thinking departs from the Lacanian claim that we live in a symbolic order, not a real world, and that the Real is what we desire, but can never know or grasp. There is a fundamental virtuality of reality that points to the lie in every truth-claim, and there are two ways of dealing with this:repression and denial. An ideology, a system or a regime becomes totalitarian when it denies the virtual character of both its world and its subject (democracy represses truth's basic lie, which makes …Read more
  •  1
    Truth as formal catholicism on Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme
    Communication and Cognition. Monographies 37 (3-4): 167-197. 2004.
    Alain Badiou’s philosophy is an attempt to re-establish truth in modern thought. The main – and indeed sole – criterion for truth is universality, he argues in all of his works, including the one on Saint Paul on which this essay focuses. In this book, Badiou argues that most of Saint Paul’s doctrinal topics can be related to the main concerns of his own thought. Thus Paul’s belief in Christ’s resurrection illustrates his own theory of the ‘event’; Paul’s characterization of the church is linked…Read more
  •  2
    Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar Vii
    State University of New York Press. 2009.
    A comprehensive examination of Lacan’s seminar on ethics
  • Wij modernen. Essays over subject en moderniteit
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 63 (1): 190-192. 2001.
  • Oświęcim
    de Uil Van Minerva 12. 1996.
  •  12
    The Documentary Real and the Shoah
    Foundations of Science 23 (2): 245-254. 2018.
    Without the support of imagination, one would not have the slightest idea of the cruel ‘real’ that has occurred in the Nazi extermination camps. Yet, in documentaries imaging the events of the Shoah, one runs the risk of missing their most basic property, namely their unimaginability. The mere idea that one is able to imagine the unimaginable comes down to a denial of the Shoah’s status as an event that defies our understanding. The unimaginable ‘real’ of the Shoah, however, is not simply locate…Read more
  • COMMENTAREN-Cliteurs monotheïsme
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 103 (2). 2011.
  •  20
    The Time of Truth
    Bijdragen 70 (2): 207-235. 2009.
    Alain Badiou’s philosophy is an attempt to re-establish truth in modern thought. The main – and indeed sole – criterion for truth is universality, he argues in all of his works, including the one on Saint Paul on which this essay focuses. In this book, Badiou argues that most of Saint Paul’s doctrinal topics can be related to the main concerns of his own thought. Thus Paul’s belief in Christ’s resurrection illustrates his own theory of the ‘event’; Paul’s characterization of the church is linked…Read more
  •  1
    Goden breken, Essays over monotheïsme
    de Uil Van Minerva 24. 2011.
  • Agora
    Wijsgerig Perspectief 50 (4)
  •  18
    Psychoanalytical theory's main axiom tells that drive does not function in a 'natural', but in a distorted and 'perverted' way. Drive's most basic purpose is not the organism's self-preservation, but its 'pleasure' . That is why life, being natural and biological, is not lived naturally and biologically: the organism takes a'polymorph perverse' distance towards its natural, biological functioning and, in that very distance, 'enjoins' it. On the most fundamental level, it lives from that very 'pl…Read more
  • Democratie als cultus
    Wijsgerig Perspectief 51 (4). 2011.
  • Tweemaal voorbij Hegel
    de Uil Van Minerva 16. 2000.
  •  132
    In his sixth seminar, Desire and Its Interpretation (1956–1957), Lacan patiently elaborates his theory of the ‘phantasm’ ($◊a), in which the object of desire (object small a) is ascribed a constitutive role in the architecture of the libidinal subject. In that seminar, Lacan shows his fascination for an aphorism of the twentieth century Christian mystic Simone Weil in her assertion: “to ascertain exactly what the miser whose treasure was stolen lost: thus we would learn much.” This is why, in hi…Read more