Peter David Mathews

This book sets out to determine the validity of an accusation made against Jacques Lacan by Noam Chomsky in an interview in 1989. He stated that Lacan was a “charlatan” – not that his ideas were flawed or wrong, but that his entire discourse was fraudulent, an accusation that has since been repeated by many other critics. Examining the arguments of key anti-Lacanian critics, Mathews weighs and contextualizes the legitimacy of Lacan’s engagements with structural linguistics, mathematical formalization, science, ethics, Hegelian dialectics, and psychoanalysis. The guiding thread is Lacan’s own recurrent interrogation of authority, which inhabits an ambiguous zone between mastery and charlatanry. This book offers a novel contribution to the field for students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, sociology, critical and literary theory.

In this chapter, ‘The Scrambled Script’: Contingency and Necessity in Iris Murdoch’s The Green Knight’, Peter D. Mathews focuses on Murdoch’s penultimate novel through the lens of Nietzsche’s concept of eternal retour. Augmenting previous readings foregrounding Levinas and Schopenhauer by Kanan Savkay and Miles Leeson respectively and drawing together multiple critical interpretations of Murdoch’s ‘dizzying multiplication of references’ (136) in this heavily intertextual late work, Mathews persuasively argues the case for the centrality of Nietzsche to its interpretation. The trajectory of this essay is from the stone on the shore of Lake Silvaplana which Nietzsche called ‘Zarathustra’s Rock’ to the rock to which Moy at the end of The Green Knight returns the stone she had taken. Contra previous interpretations of this scene offered by Carla Arnell and Rob Hardy which see this ‘as a movement of resolution and closure’ (142), Mathews contends that such readings go ‘against every lesson that the novel teaches about the contingency of the world in which Murdoch shows how the mythical scripts humanity once used to make sense of the world’s patterns are really seductive traps’ (142). Working his way through a labyrinth of allusions towards this trailblazing conclusion, Mathews has to beware of over-imposing his Nietzschean insights to the imbalance of his interpretation. To this end he acknowledges that ‘Nietzsche cannot be allowed to function as a focal point’ because the novel ‘actively rejects the possibility of being solved by a single thinker or idea’ (137). His essay thus aptly mirrors and enacts the claim Mathews makes that Murdoch ‘executes a carefully calculated double movement in this novel’ by giving ‘a prominent place to the ideas of Nietzsche, whilst taking care to remove him from a position in her text where he might be taken for an idol or saviour’ (137). Murdoch herself was likewise resisting such over-expectations by this stage in her career, and this is a compelling reading of a highly complex and disputable late text.

Although the desire to be free from God springs from humanity’s wish to enjoy pleasure without restraint, Lacan observes that humans remain neurotic and unhappy. That is because the prevailing “dead of God” form of atheism relies on the denial of a father/god, a negation that inadvertently replicates the logic of religion. Lacan, by contrast, grounds his atheism in a theory of pleasure that recognizes the role of “unpleasure” in breaking the tedium of easy, unlimited gratification. Turning to Greek tragedy, Lacan shows how the ancient world used the gods as creators of “unpleasure” to generate human _jouissance_. The figure of Antigone, in particular, shows how the divine function can fulfill “the true formula of atheism,” which is not “God is dead,” but rather, Lacan affirms, that “_God is unconscious_.”

Pairing together the Coen brothers film A Serious Man with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, this paper looks at questions about morality, illusion, and the influence of Jewish thought on contemporary ethics. Beginning with a reading of Nietzsche that locates his discussion of the Jews within its properhistorical context, it traces the beginnings of the “morality meme,” the notion of a universal moral reward that, Nietzsche argues, arises during the Deuteronomistperiod of Jewish history. The second part of the paper looks at how A Serious Man also engages in an interrogation of this moralistic overcoding of the universe, with a particular emphasis on how these questions upset Larry Gopnik’s views of both science and religion. The essay then concludes with a look at the poisonous effects of the “morality meme,” showing in particular how it has influenced the psychology of anti-Semitism. Rather than a rejection of Jewishness, the paper concludes that in A Serious Man the Coen brothers engage in a careful but loving criticism of their own culture that requires them to distance themselves from the problematic effects of its religious morality