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Notes
For the connection between desire and physical illness from a Lacanian perspective see Leader [2].
“The ability or the aspiration of the rule of law to provide certainty, an assured stability, cannot mark an achieved completeness for law, if law itself is to survive” [3, p. 20].
For example Foucaultian bio-political research agendas share three maxims: “bodies are constitutive components of the biopolitical fabric of being”, bodies “have to resist in order to exist” and “corporeal resistance produces subjectivity, not in an isolated or independent way but in the complex dynamic with the resistances of other bodies” [4, p. 31].
For a general discussion of the role of the ulema in frustrating the emergence of sovereignty see [5].
The Hebrew verb kneh/acquire has the same route as marriage.
“[T]he university’s discourse that scientizes and explains the subject’s desire has no room for the individual subject and her suffering” (p. 54).
Exemplary would be the British system of human rights review in which the High Court can declare primary legislation ‘incompatible’ with human rights without annulling it (leaving this job to the social contract); or, the British system of ‘enquiries’ where the aim is not to condemn but to ‘learn lessons’ (think of the Iraq war enquiry and the permanently tanned ‘middle east peace envoy’ Tony Blair insisting effectively that his moral choices can lead to the re-righting of international law).
Beck draws a sharp distinction between the dangers and hazards that existed in previous eras and the ones prevailing today (typical of the latter are global warming, toxic chemicals found in mass produced foodstuff etc.). Moreover, Beck argues that in contemporary society the assessment of risk is an extremely ambivalent affair insofar as risks are rooted in complex social conditions and bodies of technical knowledge. Science has been gradually loosing its kudos.
In Beck’s outline of reflexive modernization, the notion of individualization has been suggested to denote the other (private) side of globalization processes, namely the growing loosening of the structuring impact of traditional and modern institutions, like social class, gender roles or the nation, in the life-world of late modern citizens. Individuals are forced to compose their personal biographies and identities in a much more flexible and open-ended manner. The concept of individualization is imputed with agentic overtones to the extent that it endows (or burdens) individuals with the task of making choices. Individuals are described as finding themselves in a condition where decision-making in a wide range of arenas is a societal necessity.
Consequently he wrote that a thought is only completed or fully comprehended after it has been expressed, for only then can the thought be said to have passed from potentiality to actuality (Ennead IV.3.30). Therefore, to ask whether Plotinus placed more value on the potential or the actual is really of no consequence, for in the Plotinian plêrôma every potentiality generates an activity, and every activity becomes itself a potential for new activity (cf. Ennead III.8.8); and since the One, which is the goal or object of desire of all existents, is neither potentiality nor actuality, but a Platonic ‘beyond being’ (epekeina ousias), it is impossible to say whether the striving of existents, in Plotinus' schema, will result in full and complete actualization, or in a repose of potentiality that will make them like their source. Nevertheless, and this is important for it signifies a proto-secularization, Plotinus ultimately showed a preference for Greek logic over Semitic belief through his principle of authenticity which anticipates what in the present text we call ‘transcendent freedom’: “likeness to God as far as possible”, for Plotinus, is really likeness to oneself–authentic existence. Plotinus left it up to the individual to determine what this means.
“What is at stake is putting consciousness in question and not the consciousness of putting into question. At stake is a movement oriented in a way that is wholly otherwise than the grasp of consciousness and at every instant unravels, like Penelope at night, everything that was so gloriously woven the day” [18, p. 16].
Schroeder is categorical: “Levinas insists that we respect the absolute otherness of the other that the I of the subject can never fathom. But to do so, is precisely to treat the other as a transcendental thing—a noumenon. It is to assume that the other exists…. From a Lacanian perspective Levinas is completely taken in by the feminine masquerade and thinks that a true face exists beneath the other’s opaque mask! He thinks that God exists” (p. 164). And: “The true subject is Woman…. Freud thought that woman’s desire was a mystery that he had not yet solved. Lacan’s analysis shows that Freud has been taken in by the feminine masquerade. The secret of the feminine masquerade is that there is no secret, no noumenon, and no answer to the ethical question that pre-exists its asking” (p. 165).
“When an attorney acts for a client, as opposed to counselling him, she does not address the client. She is his mouthpiece…. She is now the hysterical barred subject who realizes that she is not whole. She addresses the other party who stands for the Big Other as the master signifier that explains and gives meaning to the barred subject’s problem. This is the aspect of the symbolic order that, in the client and attorney belief, causes the patient’s suffering while falsely claiming to be in the right” (pp. 156–157).
Their ethno-methodological focus is, instead, on micro-processes of construction of local and unfixed meaning on the basis of temporarily stabilized common preferences, choices and means-end schemes.
To do so, Supiot says, is not only untenable (‘scientistic’ rather than scientific) but also constitutes a nihilism that is fundamentalist in a sense directly analogous to religious fanaticism [1, pp. ix; xxv].
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Diamantidis, M. No Bad Conscience Please, We’re Speculating. Lacanian Views on the Relation of Ethics and Positive Law in Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder’s The Four Lacanian Discourses or Turning Law Inside-Out. Int J Semiot Law 23, 339–354 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9158-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9158-9