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2 - Reciprocal Portrait of Jacques Lacan in Gilles Deleuze
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- By Laurent de Sutter, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
- Edited by Boštjan Nedoh, Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Andreja Zevnik, University of Manchester
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- Book:
- Lacan and Deleuze
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 20 April 2017
- Print publication:
- 20 April 2017, pp 32-43
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Summary
Once upon a time, there was the Marquis de Sade
No one was really surprised by the appearance of the 1967 winter issue of the journal Tel Quel – an important special issue on the work of the Marquis de Sade, in which one found the names of Pierre Klossowski, Roland Barthes, Hubert Damisch, Michel Tort and Philippe Sollers. Twenty years had passed since Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbour, published by Seuil, had inaugurated the lengthy process resulting in Sade being seen by the era's intelligentsia as the paragon of subversion. This process had consisted of numerous stages, the main one being the publication of the first modern edition of the marquis's oeuvre, which Jean- Jacques Pauvert had brought to the public's attention between 1947 and 1955 (this edition had led to numerous court cases, which he finally won through an appeal in 1957). In the meantime, Maurice Blanchot had published Lautréamont et Sade, Simone de Beauvoir ‘Must We Burn de Sade?’ in Les temps modernes, Georges Bataille Literature and Evil and the chapter ‘De Sade's Sovereign Man’ in Eroticism, and Foucault had dedicated numerous passages from his History of Madness and The Order of Things to the marquis. When the special issue of Tel Quel consecrated to ‘Sade's Thought’ was published, it had become evident to all those who kept abreast of the period's intellectual developments that the name Donatien Alphonse François de Sade numbered among those most able to produce the new in thought. The fact that this came from a dynamic of subversion – or rather, as Bataille put it, from a ‘transgressive’ one – only gave it more value. This is what gave it its modernity, insofar as modernity wanted above all to call into question all established order, as well as the foundations on which it claimed to rest, in order to reconcile it with the real. Moreover, this was the thesis of one of the most significant texts on Sade during this period: Jacques Lacan's article ‘Kant with Sade’, which was intended to serve as the preface to an edition of Philosophy in the Bedroom, and ultimately appeared in Critique in 1963, before being republished three years later in Écrits.
7 - Plasma! Notes on Bruno Latour's Metaphysics of Law
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- By Laurent de Sutter, Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Bonn, Germany
- Edited by Kyle McGee
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- Book:
- Latour and the Passage of Law
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 30 October 2015, pp 197-208
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Summary
The possibility of inclusion
On 5 February 2008, in the Graham Wallas Room of the London School of Economics’ Old Building, a small group of researchers gathered to listen to Graham Harman discuss the book he had devoted to the work of Bruno Latour – the latter himself being present. It was a meeting destined to occur: since 1999, when he published his first article on the French thinker, Harman had never ceased to attempt to articulate the seemingly antagonistic thoughts of his two favourite thinkers: Latour and Heidegger. When he wrote Prince of Networks, the monograph in which he explained his understanding of the work of Latour, the form taken by this articulation was finally complete, although it remained controversial – a form in which Latour was only able to half-recognise himself. Or so he told Harman, who heard it. The book that was eventually published from the manuscript discussed at the London School of Economics differed in many respects from its original version – yet, Harman persisted in maintaining the main thesis defended in it. According to this thesis, the thought of Latour was caught in a process of infinite regress, since its primary object was the network of relationships in which things have access to something like an essence or a being. For Harman, this was a paradox that he refused, nevertheless, to regard as a flaw or a weakness – a paradox that could be formulated as a question: what is a network, if not a thing whose being, if one was to follow Latour's argumentation, should be considered in terms of relations? Even if it was a thought centred on ontological tolerance, Latour's metaphysics stumbled against the fact that there were beings excluded from this tolerance – or rather beings that this tolerance included in a form other than the form of being. To this objection, Latour's response was easy: if networks did not belong to the realm of beings, it was because being could be said in multiple ways, and because that multiplicity included an ontological ‘class’, a ‘mode of existence’, which was precisely that of the network.