Today, however, we are bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction ‘Enjoy!’, from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening. Enjoyment today effectively functions as a strange ethical duty: individuals feel guilty not for violating moral inhibitions by way of

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There is an overwhelming argument for the intimate link between Judaism and psychoanalysis: in both cases, the focus is on the traumatic encounter with the abyss of the desiring Other, with the terrifying figure of an impenetrable Other who wants something from us, but does not make it clear what this something is – the Jewish people’s encounter

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What Dostoevsky stages is a religious fantasy that has nothing whatsoever to do with a truly atheist position – although he stages it to illustrate the terrifying godless universe in which ‘everything is permitted’. So what is the compulsion that pushes the corpses to engage in the obscene sincerity of ‘saying it all’? The Lacanian answer is clear:

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In other words, when a Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not: ‘The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people,’ but rather: ‘You may think that the commodity appears to you

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The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbours doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents

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Freud uses three distinct terms for the agency that propels the subject to act ethically: he speaks of ideal ego (Idealich), ego-ideal (Ich-Ideal) and superego (Über-Ich). He tends to identify these three terms: he often uses the expression Ichideal oder Idealich (Ego-Ideal or ideal ego), and the title of chapter 3 of his short booklet The Ego and

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Although jouissance can be translated as ‘enjoyment’, translators of Lacan often leave it in French in order to render palpable its excessive, properly traumatic character: we are not dealing with simple pleasures, but with a violent intrusion that brings more pain than pleasure. This is how we usually perceive the Freudian superego, the cruel and

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We should not be surprised, then, to find an echo of this duality in Freudian theory: on the one side the hermeneutics of the unconscious, interpretations of dreams, slips of the tongue or other such ‘mistakes’, symptoms (exemplified in Freud’s three early masterpieces The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and The Joke

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This brings us back to Freud who, in the development of his theory of trauma, changed his position in a way strangely homologous to Einstein’s above-mentioned shift. Freud started with the notion of trauma as something that, from outside, intrudes into our psychic life and disturbs its balance, throwing out of joint the symbolic coordinates that

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