Lacan’s writings were for many decades the primary mode of access that the public had to his work. This was unfortunate because Lacan disdained writing and strove to write in a way that could not be readily understood. His oral seminars, which are now available, provide an enlightening contrast. This introduction concentrates on Lacan’s seminars to present a philosopher preoccupied with the problem of subjectivity and how the insights gleaned from psychoanalysis might be able to contribute to thinking through this problem. Many critics have wrongly associated Lacan with other French thinkers of his time, such as Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault. This book will draw a significant contrast between them and highlight their irreconcilable differences.

Lacan attempts to bring the psychoanalytic insights of Sigmund Freud into the philosophy of German Idealism, specifically that of Kant and Hegel. Unlike Freud, Lacan was schooled in the history of philosophy, and this allowed him to trace the implications of introducing the unconscious into the theory of subjectivity in Kant and Hegel. Throughout his career, Lacan insists on the subject as what sticks out from its social context thanks to the existence of the unconscious. The unconscious marks the subject’s failure to fit within its social world, and Lacan makes this failure to fit the basis for his philosophy. Although Lacan sees himself as a psychoanalyst rather than a philosopher, we must recognize the significance of his philosophical contribution.

This chapter considers how advocacy of press freedom necessarily implicates contested political questions about desirable structures of governance and social interaction. Professor Magarian discusses two political oppositions that strongly influence how the free press functions: objectivity vs. subjectivity and institutionalism vs. populism. First, the chapter describes the late-twentieth-century news media’s heightened commitment to objective reporting. That commitment has strong political resonance with our era’s anxiety about submergence of objective truth in political debates. At the same time, the news media’s push toward objectivity fostered a stultifying homogeneity that prompted dynamic efforts, embodied imperfectly in the Fairness Doctrine, to complicate hegemonic narratives. Present advocates for press freedom must assess which truths the press should propound and which positions it should interrogate. Second, the chapter juxtaposes the institutionalized character of dominant late-twentieth-century news media with the populist fragmentation of news sources in the age of online communication. Institutionalized mass media have inculcated valuable journalistic norms of professionalism and ethics that contemporary online news sources often elide. However, populist mass media present a wider, more diverse range of voices than institutionalized media support. Present advocates for press freedom need to pursue the optimal balance between these opposing virtues.

The power of meaning is revealed in diverse arenas from health and wellbeing, to economics, to the way children engage their worlds, to the organized worldviews of adults. The goal of this book is to go beyond past work on meaning and social relationships by considering comprehensive developmental data at each phase of life that was not previously available.

There exists, under various names and guises since the late nineteenth century,  a common subject position constructed among Western gay men that engages power, agency, embodiment, sexual experience and marginalized identity in a way that sheds light on the essence of Wagner’s musical idiom and its lasting force in Western culture. Through analysis and close reading of instrumental passages from the end of the opening prelude to Lohengrin and the prelude to Act II of Die Walküre, this article constructs a non-essentialist gay-male subjectivity to explain the emotional force that Wagner’s use of tonality, harmony, theme, form and timbre achieve from this particular viewpoint. More specifically, the article traces the various teleologies of Wagner’s compositional practice and the ways in which these musical teleologies reinforce the explicit textual and dramatic centralities of sex and power in Wagner’s work, themselves dependent on these same centralities in contemporary culture.

Continuing the exploration of categories related to the attitudinal ones, yet going beyond them, this chapter focuses primarily on the concept of subjectivity, and secondarily on the related concept of mirativity. It revisits the distinction between subjective and objective modality as it is traditionally made in the literature. It offers an alternative analysis in terms of the concept of subjectivity vs. intersubjectivity. It also considers the relationship between (inter)subjectivity, as relevant for the attitudinal categories, and two other major notions of subjectivity, notably Traugott’s and Langacker’s. It argues that these different concepts concern different phenomena, although all of them are relevant for the domain of the attitudinal categories. The chapter moreover explores the status of (inter)subjectivity relative to the qualificational hierarchy. It thereby draws in mirativity, as a semantically similar dimension. And it reconsiders the status of experienced, hearsay and memory, as dimensions that share some relevant characteristics with (inter)subjectivity and mirativity.

Becoming a subject to oneself is a challenge. To make the task somewhat more meaningful, I have presented a narrative that builds on experiences that are likely to resonate with other scholars from the Global South. In the academic journey from separation to synthesis, I have had the good fortune of collaborating with scientists from young students to renowned scholars, to whom I owe immense gratitude. I chose to modify the given metaphor of a pillar to better suit my orientation both to my inner self and to the outside world.

This chapter demonstrates how young male Taiwanese elites turned to gendered masculinity in response to colonial redefinitions of women within the family and marriage from the 1920s onward. Taiwanese masculinity derived from the mixture of Han Chinese tradition and Japanese colonialism. Chinese men had developed their masculinity on sociocultural standings and power in and outside of the household. Meanwhile, male Taiwanese elites often received higher education in Japan, and they built Taiwanese nationalism on calls for regulating or ending the practices of bride prices, daughter adoption, and premarital sex among ordinary Taiwanese men and women. In those top-down calls, Taiwanese elites defined themselves as men in terms of their ability to facilitate individual willpower and liberalize society. Far from being personal, their masculinity made it necessary for the elites to work with the colonial authorities to materialize family reforms in the late 1920s. To shore up their sociopolitical standing, those elites held women responsible for obstructing family reforms and painted them in a negative light, constructing masculinity while assigning additional gendered burdens.

This chapter demonstrates that a researcher is attached to the analytic process in ways that make it difficult to be completely independent and objective when doing research. Issues of objectivity and subjectivity are discussed, which offer a frame to understand the ways in which a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study, as well as their professional vision and institutional positionality, inform the analytic process. After reading this chapter, readers will understand that discourse analysis research is inherently subjective; know that a researcher’s cultural familiarity with an object of study is crucial to doing discourse analysis; be able to identify and adopt multiple analytic perspectives; be capable of applying reflexive practices to the analytic process; and understand, and know how to deal with, the power dynamics that exist in discourse analysis research.

This chapter explores Pentecostal conversion as both an affective and a political process. It considers the kind of subjects young urban Pentecostals are called upon to become: organised, enterpreneurial, armed not only with a transformed heart but with a ‘vision’ for their future and a ‘strategic plan’. This subject both converges with and diverges from the RPF’s attempts to create ‘ideal’ subjects who are able to participate in the country’s post-genocide development. While some young Pentecostals benefited from such self-making, others became disillusioned. Instead, they highlighted the limits of the Pentecostal project and its inability to deliver the bright future they felt they had been promised.

This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Waves through the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money waxes nostalgic for a world of industrial capital where people with good characters invest in respected businesses over the long term. Keynes blames the “great slump” on a system of financial speculation made possible by the modern corporation that encourages investors to anticipate and value the vacillations of popular opinion instead of sound business practices. This chapter argues that Woolf’s novel encodes the logic of financial speculation as described by Keynes in her depiction of characters who redefine themselves according to fluctuating social configurations. The resulting novelistic poetics constitute an aesthetic of volatility characteristic of high modernism that anticipates the emergence of affective intensity as the dominant value form of our own era of capitalism.

This chapter explores the interplay between identification and distance that Lucian sets up for his readers in relationship to the speaking characters in the Dialogues of the Courtesans. While readers are, at times, invited to identify with the plights of these ‘others’ as partners in restrictive power structures, at other times, the otherness of the courtesans is emphasised through female verbal markers, female-specific cults, and women-only sexuality. Again and again, the subjectivity of the courtesan is offered to the reader, only to be withdrawn from their grasp. And, in fact, in its current form, the collection begins with a soldier and ends with a virgin – the courtesan managing to slip away. Lucian’s play with the courtesan’s subjectivity leaves his readers full of suspicions about intentional misdirection, both by the characters within the stories and by the author Lucian himself.

Chapter 6 explores charms’ re-purposing of liturgical texts from a theoretical perspective. The integrity of baptismal and Visitatio utterances and acts may be compromised, from a liturgical perspective, when they are reused for charm healing. The accommodations that result allow charms simultaneously to invoke those sacramental liturgies while accomplishing something different. As charms manipulate prayers and formulas extracted from liturgy for folk healing, the re-contextualization results in disparities. These prove important because they reveal the integration of ecclesiastical texts and gestures into traditional practices. When charms adapt particular liturgical texts and actions, the liturgical forms undergo a pragmatic-linguistic process of “de-institutionalization.” The loss of extra-linguistic context supports the charms’ discursive ends and reinforces its status as a distinct institution.

What does the periodical essay of the early eighteenth century contribute to the novel as it was developed by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and others? This chapter focuses on how the periodical essay showed novelists new possibilities both about how to build a relationship with readers over time and on the use of an authorial persona to narrate and organise incidents. The distinctive intimacy the essay creates between author and reader, cultivated in the case of the periodical essay in instalments published over time and with attention to special features of the protracted duration of production and consumption, provides both rhetorical and material inspiration for novelists experimenting with new ways to reach readers and intensify their relationships with them.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

This chapter elaborates on why an exclusive focus on the individual within psychology cannot be culturally valid for all children. Contrasting Western individualistic goals for child-rearing and development with the more collectivistic goals and orientations of the majority world, this chapter shows that foundational assumptions regarding the nature of subjectivity differ by culture. Three specific components of the interdependent approach to child development as demonstrated by African, Latin American, Indigenous, and Asian societies are examined in depth. These themes include a holistic view of development, intelligence as a form of social responsibility, and children as apprentices. Together, these themes characterize child development processes within the majority world. Research shows that societies that consider a socially contingent self as the ideal outcome for development might be more likely to support collaborative competence. Overall, the literature reviewed suggests that Western conceptions of subjectivity and therefore intersubjectivity do not extend to all cultures. In addition, collaborative competence highlights the strengths of minoritized children in the US while supporting all children’s development.