Repression in the Existential Lives of Dostoevsky’s Poor People

Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Jesús Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Existential Crisis

This paper explores Sigmund Freud's concept of repression in the existential strife exhibited by two main characters, Makar Alexyevitch and Varvara Alexyevna, in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Poor People. To demonstrate this, I psychoanalyze of how they handle their repressed desires, emphasizing the necessity of Freud's main rule for this method: Openness. Dostoevsky's Poor People presents an existential crisis handled through openness and mishandled when an individual represses one's desires. In delving into Dostoevsky's first novel, I demonstrate a link between the existential and psychological, wherein individuals strive to overcome themselves. Surprisingly, this link has a come a common influence between Dostoevsky and Freud: Immanuel Kant. I briefly discuss this shared similarity to show the basic idea of an "existential middle" derived from a Freudian psychoanalysis of Dostoevsky's Poor People.

Immanuel Kant

2002 ◽  
Author(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Henry Allison ◽  
Peter Heath ◽  
Gary Hatfield ◽  
Michael Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant

Who's Afraid of Immanuel Kant?

1982 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 431-432
Author(s):  
John C. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant

Introduction: Plato’s Nightmare

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Marmysz
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Objective Reality

This introductory chapter examines the “problem” of nihilism, beginning with its philosophical origins in the ideas of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. It is argued that film is an inherently nihilistic medium involving the evocation of illusory worlds cut loose from objective reality. This nihilism of film is distinguished from nihilism in film; the nihilistic content also present in some (but not all) movies. Criticisms of media nihilism by authors such as Thomas Hibbs and Darren Ambrose are examined. It is then argued, contrary to such critics, that cinematic nihilism is not necessarily degrading or destructive. Because the nihilism of film encourages audiences to linger in the presence of nihilism in film, cinematic nihilism potentially trains audiences to learn the positive lessons of nihilism while remaining safely detached from the sorts of dangers depicted on screen.

Immanuel Kant

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Brophy
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Scientific Discovery ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Individual Freedom ◽  
Philosophical Foundation ◽  
Advanced Capitalism ◽  
Moral Feeling ◽  
Transcendental Idealist

Agamben’s complicated engagement with Immanuel Kant celebrates the brilliance of the German idealist’s thought by disclosing its condemnatory weight in Western philosophy. Kant was writing in the midst of burgeoning industrial capitalism, when each new scientific discovery seemed to push back the fog of religion in favour of science and reason; meanwhile Agamben’s work develops in concert with the crises of advanced capitalism and borrows significantly from those philosophers who endured the most demoralising upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century. Whatever lanugo Kant was eager for us to shed in the name of individual freedom,1 Agamben sees in this crusade for civic maturity a surprising prescience: ‘[I]t is truly astounding how Kant, almost two centuries ago and under the heading of a sublime “moral feeling,” was able to describe the very condition that was to become familiar to the mass societies and great totalitarian states of our time’ (HS 52). To a remarkable extent, Agamben finds that Kant’s transcendental idealist frame of thought lays the philosophical foundation for the state of exception.

Vieillir, dit-elle: Nancy Huston's Feminist Trajectory and Writing Female Ageing

2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-339
Author(s):  
Kate Averis
Keyword(s):  
Continuous Process ◽  
Later Life ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
Women’S Experiences ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
Women's Experiences ◽  
Gender And Age

This article examines Nancy Huston's writing of female ageing in light of her intellectual and personal trajectory as a feminist thinker. It identifies women's ageing as an integrative and ubiquitous phenomenon in Huston's œuvre, tracing the presence of this thematic and theoretical concern to her very first published works, and outlining its development until her most recent works, before examining a key instance of her fictional treatment of female ageing in Lignes de faille. Drawing on a literary, philosophical and sociological theoretical framework, it argues that Huston furthers feminist approaches to female senescence by inscribing women's experiences of later life not in terms of existential crisis but rather as part of the continuous process of change and transformation inherent to subjective development. The analysis aims to address pressing questions surrounding the intersections of gender and age that are at the forefront of Huston criticism and feminist studies.

‘Family Romance’ and the Oedipalization of Freudian Psychoanalysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-187
Author(s):  
Herman Westerink ◽  
Philippe Van Haute
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Oedipus Complex ◽  
Difference Family ◽  
Radical Theory ◽  
Freudian Psychoanalysis ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Family Romance ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Informative Text

Although Freud's ‘Family Romances’ from 1909 is hardly ever discussed at length in secondary literature, this article highlights this short essay as an important and informative text about Freud's changing perspectives on sexuality in the period in which the text was written. Given the fact that Freud, in his 1905 Three Essays, develops a radical theory of infantile sexuality as polymorphously perverse and as autoerotic pleasure, we argue that ‘Family Romances’, together with the closely related essay on infantile sexual theories (1908), paves the way for new theories of sexuality defined in terms of object relations informed by knowledge of sexual difference. ‘Family Romances’, in other words, preludes the introduction of the Oedipus complex, but also – interestingly – gives room for a Jungian view of sexuality and sexual phantasy. ‘Family Romances’ is thus a good illustration of the complex way in which Freud's theories of sexuality developed through time.

Curb Cuts: Crip Displacements and El Edificio de Enfrente

Somatechnics ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-215
Author(s):  
Robert McRuer
Keyword(s):  
Mexico City ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Poor People ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Cultural System ◽  
Good Will ◽  
British Embassy ◽  
The Uk

Theorists of neoliberalism have placed dispossession and displacement at the centre of their analyses of the workings of contemporary global capitalism. Disability, however, has not figured centrally into these analyses. This essay attends to what might be comprehended as the crip echoes generated by dispossession, displacement, and a global austerity politics. Centring on British-Mexican relations during a moment of austerity in the UK and gentrification in Mexico City, the essay identifies both the voices of disability that are recognized by and made useful for neoliberalism as well as those shut down or displaced by this dominant economic and cultural system. The spatial politics of austerity in the UK have generated a range of punishing, anti-disabled policies such as the so-called ‘Bedroom Tax.’ The essay critiques such policies (and spatial politics) by particularly focusing on two events from 2013: a British embassy good will event exporting British access to Mexico City and an installation of photographs by Livia Radwanski. Radwanski's photos of the redevelopment of a Mexico City neighbourhood (and the displacement of poor people living in the neighbourhood) are examined in order to attend to the ways in which disability might productively haunt an age of austerity, dispossession, and displacement.

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