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4‘Subject van zijn daden’: Lacaniaanse reflecties bij een foucaultiaanse levenskunstAlgemeen 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
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11A Sleepless DreamThéoRèmes 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
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3Singulier metafysischAlgemeen 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.
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3Ethics and the Splendor of Antigone. An Encounter with Charles Freeland, "Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan’s The Ethics of Psychoanalysis"Phaenex: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture 10. 2015.
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4Holy Crisis. On the Problem that Espouses Modern Art to Modern SpiritualityPerichoresis 18 (3): 47-61. 2020.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
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81A Small, Additonal, Added- on Life Speaking. Remarks on the Vitalism in Giorgio Agamben's Critical TheoryFilozofski Vestnik 30 (2). 2009.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
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9The Documentary Real and the ShoahFoundations 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
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26Selfless love: Pur Amour in Fénelon and MalebrancheInternational 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
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140Act without denial: Slavoj žižek on totalitarianism, revolution and political actStudies 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
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1Truth as formal catholicism on Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalismeCommunication 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
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2Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar ViiState University of New York Press. 2009.A comprehensive examination of Lacan’s seminar on ethics
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12The Documentary Real and the ShoahFoundations 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
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20The Time of TruthBijdragen 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
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18Sublimatie en perversie: Genese en belang Van een conceptueel onderscheid bij lacanTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 65 (3): 465-485. 2003.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
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132Misers or lovers? How a reflection on Christian mysticism caused a shift in Jacques Lacan’s object theoryContinental Philosophy Review 46 (2): 189-208. 2013.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
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Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Religion |
Social and Political Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
European Philosophy |