Freud's work has been both praised and maligned for its frequent introduction of myths and narratives which attempt to map out the archaeology of the human psyche. These range from classical myth to the invention of new myths, from the use of the Sophoclean Oedipus to the strange story about the origin of society set out in Totem and Taboo. Critics of Freud have pointed out the limitations of these models, their historical contingency, and the implausibility of their claims in terms of evidence taken from other fields in the human sciences. As historical narratives, their weaknesses are taken as impeachments of Freudian theory as a whole. Hence the psychological theories of the Oedipus complex or the castration complex become, in their turn, mere myths, fictions that collapse once their historical underpinnings undergo scrutiny.

Even to those sympathetic to psychoanalysis, many of Freud’s narratives seem quaint and far-fetched, and yet, as the recently published text on the importance of the ice age for human development makes clear, such apparent flights of fancy formed an integral part of Freud’s procedure. A search for origins was characteristic of much early twentieth century thought, as it had been in the Enlightenment, and Freud’s commitment to a form of phylogeny was shared by many other Continental thinkers. While this is not the place to go into the details of Freud’s use of classical myth and mythic constructions, we can ask whether Lacan’s methods of exposition have anything in common with Freud’s.

Aiming to be neither “postmodern” nor “premodern” nor indeed “modern,” the “postmetaphysical” theology associated with French thinker Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) responds to a Christian God and Father who, as absolute love or charity, and according to that charity’s “essential anachronism,” would remain beyond all historical or cultural determination even while abandoning himself fully to history in the Christ. From such a perspective, Marion’s theology seeks to free the self-revelation of the Christian God from every precondition or determination of human thought and language – and above all from the thought and language of “Being” that have dominated Western metaphysics and its “ontotheological” conception of God as a “supreme being.”

In his critique of metaphysics as “ontotheology,” Marion is indebted primarily to Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and in an eventual critique of Heidegger himself, Marion will draw on the post-Heideggerian thought of Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995), but Marion’s core theological vision is shaped most decisively by the “divine-names” theology and “mystical” theology found in the late fifth- or early sixth-century writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (or the “Pseudo-Dionysius”). In the Dionysian appeal to an inconceivable and ineffable “Good beyond Being,” Marion locates an extrametaphysical “God without Being.” The “without” in this theology of “God without Being” does not mean to indicate that God is not or does not exist, but rather that any divine existence or nonexistence that human thought might ever imagine falls infinitely short of the divine generosity that stands at the heart of revelation. The highest name for God, Marion insists, is not to be found in the metaphysical predication of Being or essence but rather in the theological praise of goodness or love, for while finite creatures must first be in order to love, God loves “before Being,” and through that love alone God’s goodness gives all – including the Being of beings itself.

Even with all their diversity, feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies have one thing in common: they make the liberation of women central to the theological task. This is not to say that there is complete consensus concerning the ends of such liberation. For example, feminists who argue that the flourishing of women is achieved by resistance to sexism are criticized by those who claim that such patterns unduly privilege the category of gender. Despite these conflicts, however, feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologians have historically shared a general liberation hermeneutic, marked, at least in part, by commitments around identity. Rather than positioning themselves as generic “theology,”these works emerged out of situations of oppression for marginalized groups that initiated critical assessments of existing social, ecclesial, and theological structures. The result has been liberative interpretive practices crafted from new combinations of the tradition and contemporary resources.

Postmodernism enters this theological discourse by providing resources designed to advance such liberative ends. The primary litmus for any postmodernism will be its contribution to analyses of the complexities of gender, race, sexual, and class oppressions. What is “post” about such resources is their refusal of some of the “modern” habits in theology, but only those that inhibit exploration of these conditions of oppression.

Realism or verismo? Basic assumptions and related problems

In late 1894 Giovanni Verga and Emile Zola (1840-1902), who had first met in Paris some twelve years earlier, were guests in Rome of Luigi Capuana. Capuana and Zola discussed literary theory to the veiled annoyance of Verga. When Zola ventured the opinion that Italian verismo and French naturalism were the same thing, Verga exclaimed: “Verismo, verismo . . . I prefer to call it the truth.” Many literary historians, having spent much time and ingenuity in discriminating between the two terms, would dispute Zola's opinion. Zola, Capuana, Verga, and other European nineteenth-century novelists, together with playwrights, poets, and visual artists outside the scope of this work, consciously followed a number of conventions and methodologies loosely called “realism,”whose various subcategories, however defined, all assume the artist's intention of modeling the artwork on life as it actually is.

This assumption raises intractable problems. Even if one was willing to take intentions into account, they tend to be undeclared, or obscured by lack of evidence. They may sometimes be reconstructed from the author’s work, but to use the work as evidence of the author’s alleged intentions in order to take them as material for its evaluation is a vicious circle. Declared intentions are often unrealized or largely at variance with the actual texts – and Verga’s, as we shall see, represent a case in point. Second, how does one model literature on life?

Theological methodology is like one of those cases where a foreign plant is imported to provide ground cover and ends up being a persistent weed that cannot be eradicated. The more it is attacked, chopped, and hacked, the more it grows. Once, it was seen as a desirable plant, the flower of theological development. It grew because it was cultivated and highly desired. As it has grown more disputed and even out of favor, it keeps coming back and is as profuse as ever. Why is the theological garden, so to speak, in such straits?

At the fading of modernity, it has become clear in theology that methodology, or, as it is often technically called, prolegomena, was central to its assumptions. As many have pointed out, modernity generally relied on a secure foundation and then a secure method to build on to the foundation – at least that was the goal. Postmodernism is the result of repeated failure to achieve such a lofty ideal; thus the postmodern turn especially rejects such reliance on foundationalism and method. The criticism of relying on method, however, has led to the proliferation of writings on proper methodology! The result is someone like William Placher writing an excellent book, entitled Unapologetic Theology, on theological methodology that eschews emphasis on methodology. He reflects in the Preface, “A good many people – myself included – have urged contemporary theologians to abandon their preoccupation with methodology and get on with the business of really doing theology. I therefore confess embarrassment at being the author of a sort of extended preface to contemporary discussions about theological method. Prologomena [sic] to prologomena [sic]! Worse and worse!”

Origins, models, themes, language, and politics of neorealism

Neorealism as an object of study has turned out to be a puzzling problem of literary history. Elio Vittorini – an important neorealist novelist, editor of the interdisciplinary journal Il Politecnico (1945-7) that championed neorealism, and editor of “I Gettoni,”a series devoted to young writers published by Einaudi from 1951 to 1958 – maintained that each neorealist writer had his or her own neorealism. Pier Paolo Pasolini thought that what neorealists had in common was basically just a “taste” for the real. Some critics point to Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929) by Alberto Moravia, to Luce fredda (Cold Light, 1933) by Umberto Barbaro (1902-59), and to Tre operai (Three Workers, 1934) by Carlo Bernari (1909-92) as examples of early neorealist novels, but other critics cite Cesare Pavese's Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters, 1941) as the only proto-neorealist text before World War II. The term neorealismo was used occasionally in Italy in the 1930s to refer to new forms of realism (for example, the German Neue Sachlichkeit) then emerging in Europe in opposition to nonrealist movements such as expressionism, futurism, and symbolism. In Italy, modernist forms of realism flourished in the 1930s, ranging from the “magic realism” of Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) to the experimental fictions, tinged with surrealism, of Paola Masino (1908–89), to the existential novels of Moravia and Barbaro. Novels such as Maria Zef (Maria Zef, 1936) by Paola Drigo (1876–1938) testify to the enduring legacy of verismo and foreshadow the neorealist interest in the economic underdevelopment of many regions of Italy, particularly the South or the Mezzogiorno.

Introduction

It has been claimed, with some justification, that the 'legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy'. The Greeks, after all, not only defined the main areas of philosophical inquiry – metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics and so on – but also formulated the questions which that inquiry has always sought to answer. Yet it was in the period from the twelfth to the seventeenth century that Greek thinkers, together with their Roman interpreters and followers, exerted the most profound influence on later philosophy. During this long epoch, extending from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the start of the early modern era, everything which survives today of ancient philosophy, with the exception of a few works, was recovered after the losses incurred in the aftermath of the Roman empire's collapse. Moreover, continuing the work of the Church Fathers, vigorous efforts were made, at different times and with varying degrees of success, to bring the major schools of pagan philosophy into line with Christianity. Once restored and reconciled with Christian theology, ancient philosophical traditions supplied the framework within which the philosophers operated and the foundation on which they built their own systems.

Discussing the interrelationships between film and literature, Italo Calvino once wrote: “There remains the fact that the cinema is continually being drawn toward literature. In spite of having such power of its own, the cinema has always been afflicted by jealousy of the written text: it wants to 'write'.” There are strands to the respective histories of the twentieth-century Italian novel and the Italian cinema that at times come together to form a kind of Gordian knot, so to speak, so tightly harnessed are they. At such times as these historical strands cross over, literature and cinema can be said to enter into a form of dialogue with one another. This dialogue between the Italian cinema and literature is amongst the most complex, fluid, and multifaceted to be found in any culture. To appreciate its full scope one has to acknowledge it at a number of interrelated levels. First, there is the most immediate and most commonly discussed question of adapting Italian novels to film form.

Works by Lacan

A detailed chronological list of Lacan's publications and Seminars (with their transcriptions) is available in Elisabeth Roudinesco's Lacan, pp. 511-34. Since the focus of this Companion is on English translations, the texts quoted here are available in English. I quote all the titles of the Seminars (one can find a useful summary of Lacan's works in Marcelle Marini, Jacques Lacan: The French Contexts, trans. Anne Tomiche (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 139-249. There is an unpublished and unauthorized English translation of all the Seminars by Cormac Gallagher. The dates given in parentheses in the first section are those of the original publications or, in the case of the Seminars, of the date on which they were held. I do not list the texts that are available in Ecrits: A Selection.

Geography played a crucial role in defining the Italian experience of “modernity.” Italy's official modernist movement, futurism, was the offspring of the northern urban centers of Milan, Turin, and Genoa, cities in which the con- flict between modernization and cultural tradition was the most severe, while the Italian modernists discussed here all approached the complex question of modern subjectivity from standpoints conditioned to a significant degree by their own regional origins. The culture of Pirandello's preindustrialized Sicily, remotely distant from the modern industrial province of Svevo's Trieste, accentuated the playwright's terror of life falling apart in a world of paradox and contradiction, a fear that Svevo had under control, and Gadda, armed with the weapons of a scientific culture, sought to overcome in parody and satire. However, in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the “modernity” these writers faced each in his own unique way was one with the industrialization of production, the acceleration of the tempo of life due to developments in science and technology, and the emergence of new forms of class struggle. The ambiguity, anguish, and spiritual fluctuation, deriving from the breakdown of old hierarchies and the expansion of the capitalist market, were the general life-symptoms of a collective Western humanity, which the literary art of these authors at once incorporated and attempted to treat.

In 1902 Anna Franchi published Avanti il divorzio!, a largely autobiographical work that explored with frank directness the moral squalor engendered by the failure of Italian political leaders to pass divorce legislation. Franchi's radical and dramatic demand for an end to the sexual and economic oppression of women burst into a climate where few politicians dared challenge the legal status quo on the family, and where feminist demands focused more on the vote and improving women's working conditions than on a fundamental overhaul of social and family life. If Franchi's experience was a product of her times, her rebellion was ahead of her day. Almost thirty years later in La mia vita (My Life, 1940) she looks back on her youth and describes her life then as a curious mixture of the end of romanticism and the rise of new theories that seemed attractive to a younger generation of women. The “theories” she refers to obliquely are new political positions forming on the left associated with anarchism, socialism, and feminism that achieved comparatively little in terms of legislation but which had a substantial impact on social and cultural thought in Italy during the twentieth century.

Introduction. From fossils to Philosophy

Hippolytus, antipope in the early third century AD, has this to tell us in the course of the survey of pagan Greek philosophy he presents in the first book of his Refutation of all Heresies (exhibit A):

You might think that Xenophanes’ heresy was to have been someone who left God out of the creation story. But that does not seem to have been a point Hippolytus was wanting to make. What leaps out of his report is the picture it paints of Xenophanes as pioneer practitioner of the scientific method.

Few are those who willingly confess that among their shortcomings they lack a sense of humor. Likewise, I have not yet encountered the rare specimen who would admit to being a pervert. This unfortunate state of affairs is due, among other things, to the fact that perversion, even in the Lacanian era, has always remained an outsider. Perversion is not a structure of desire that evokes sympathy or kinship. Moreover, Lacan did not describe perversion with the same plethora of clinical insights that he provided for hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and phobia. He was able to extract from Freud's cases - Dora, the Rat Man, and Little Hans – those strategies that underlie all of psychic life and that therefore no longer need to be perceived in pathological terms: it is inevitable that the human subject will “choose” a neurosis (SE 1, p. 220) enabling him or her to negotiate the thin line between the need to attain erotic gratification and the fear of losing the ability to want. Hence neurotic compromises are deeply ingrained in the fabric of daily life and are therefore no less respectable than any other creative productions. What psychoanalysis can offer, to those who seek its services, are merely alternative pathways that can potentially disrupt the deadly routine of the repetition compulsion.

The word Trinity is a time-honoured shorthand for speaking about the unique claims of the Christian understanding of God. Because Christians believe that there is only one God, they have typically been classified with other monotheists, such as Jews and Muslims. But, unlike the adherents of these faiths, Christians believe that God has entered fully and directly into the created order, and has become concretely embodied in the world, in two ways: God became incarnate in the womb of a Jewish woman named Mary; she gave birth in Palestine some two thousand years ago, and her child was named Jesus. In addition, God has also been poured out on the world, into the communities of believers known as Israel and the church; this concrete embodiment of God is called the Holy Spirit. These two concrete manifestations of God are considered sufficiently different from the One who forever dwells in “light inaccessible” that the designation “monotheism” may simply be inadequate as a description of the Christian faith. For Christians, the one God is also three: the Father or Source, who is the origin of all things; the Son or Word, who comes forth from God and takes on human flesh; and the Spirit, the “Giver of Life,” who dwells in human hearts and animates the believing community.

The Platonic Corpus

From any perspective, Plato's dialogues are extraordinary. Others have tried to write philosophical dialogues, frequently in imitation of his. Indeed other associates of Socrates had already used the genre before Plato adopted it; bits and pieces, along with titles, remain. But the Platonic dialogues remain essentially sui generis, whether taken singly or as a whole. There are somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five genuine works which, while always returning to ethics and politics, between them cover a vast range of topics, and cover them in often startlingly different ways; always, however, using a cast of characters that excludes the author, even in disguise. A main feature is that they define - and would later be taken as having defined - what philosophy itself is, not just in terms of its subject matter but in terms of method and attitude or approach. This they do chiefly by exhibiting philosophy in action; or rather, typically, by exhibiting a philosopher - usually Socrates - going about his business, often in confrontation with others (teachers of rhetoric, sophists, politicians, poets) who dealt with the same subject-matter but in different, non-philosophical ways.

In 1970s America, at the crest of second-wave feminism, Sigmund Freud was the man women loved to hate. They were not without reason. The medical specialty practiced in Freud's name by American analysts (mostly men) devoted itself not to helping patients (mostly women) discover their desire, but to enforcing ideas about “normal”femininity. To those beginning to question the conventions of domesticity and heterosexuality, psychoanalysis, with its talk of “female masochism” and “penis envy,” seemed the enemy of women's liberation. Freud's words were plucked out of context to prove it.

But in 1974, the British feminist Juliet Mitchell published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, which would have enormous impact on a generation of women, both academic and activist. Mitchell wrote: “[a] rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud’s works is fatal for feminism. However it may have been used, psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one. If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we cannot afford to neglect it.”