Waldo's Beautiful Things: Possession and Possessing in Otto Preminger's Laura

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
William P MacNeil
Keyword(s):  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Objet Petit A ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
The Law ◽  
Police Detective ◽  
Psychic Condition

Despite its highly subjectivised title, Laura – Otto Preminger's dazzling 1944 noir classic – is, according to this article, a film not so much about persons as things. And what spectacularly beautiful things Laura proffers: exquisite objets d'art, chic fashion, striking design. All of which points to a certain psychic condition that underpins Laura: namely, fetishism. Of course, the fetish nonpareil in the film is Laura herself; she is the not so ‘obscure object of desire’ for all and sundry, possessing everyone in the film, and, in turn, being treated by those possessed, as a possession herself. Though the nature of these sorts of possessory regimes differs dramatically, being contingent upon the psychic profile of the possessor: love interest Shelby Carpenter, police detective Mark McPherson and wealthy mentor, Waldo Lydecker. This article will explore Laura's competing possessory regimes, utilising psychoanalytic concepts such as hysteria, repetition compulsion and the death drive, as well as fetishism and sado-masochism to unpack this vivid filmic representation of the ‘Law of Desire’ as a desire for what is, here, law's objet petit a – feminine sexuality itself.

Lexilalia: On Translating a Dictionary of Untranslatable Philosophical Terms

Paragraph ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Apter
Keyword(s):  
Death Drive ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Psychic Condition

Lexilalia, a kind of repetition disorder or form of ‘repeat-after-reading’, is contextualized in this article as a term for continual or interminable translation. Barbara Cassin has emphasized how one definition of the ‘Untranslatable’ is temporal, associated with a symptomatic condition of ‘keeping on translating’. In extending Cassin's ‘time’ of translation to the psychic condition of translating philosophical terms and working with encyclopedic objects, the article concludes with some reflections on anxiety, concept-making and the death drive.

Figures of Interest

2018 ◽  
pp. 175-185
Author(s):  
Elissa Marder
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Dominant Male ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Relationship

In his seminar on the Death Penalty, Derrida insists upon the irreducibly theatrical and spectacular nature of any legal execution. An execution is not merely the material outcome of a legal process, but also the very representational means by which the law stages and asserts its own legitimacy. He also raises a set of questions concerning the relationship between the machines that administer the death penalty and dominant male fantasies regarding feminine sexuality, calling attention to the fact that the death machine is always a woman (virgin, mother, whore or widow) who, in carrying out the cold decree of the law, is depicted as a voracious and terrifying vampire. This chapter examines how discourses surrounding the death penalty have consistently called upon and been haunted by powerful phantasies about female sexuality and why those phantasies paradoxically belong to the very logic rational justice to which they appear to be opposed.

Terrore, affascinazione, incertezza: una lettura del saggio di Freud Das Unheimliche

2009 ◽  
pp. 167-190
Author(s):  
Luigi Antonello Armando
Keyword(s):  
Key Words ◽  
Italian Renaissance ◽  
Internal Space ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Law

- Freud begun writing Das Unheimliche (The Uncanny, 1919) while he was writing Totem and Taboo, and concluded it interrupting his writing of Jenzeit der Lustprinzip (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920). Das Unheimliche is seen as a chapter of a larger work, whose other chapters are the two over mentioned works and those on Leonardo (1910) and on Michleangelo (1914). Das Unheimliche is considered the expression of Freud's attempt to overcome an obstacle which prevented him to formulate the law of repetition compulsion: the obstacle rising from his experience of the works of art of Italian Renaissance and of their opening the internal space of uncertainty. It is maintained that the contemporary significance of Freud's work lies in the result of that attempt.KEY WORDS: uncanny, terror, art, new, uncertainty

The Moral Law: Derrida reading Kant

Derrida Today ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jacques de Ville
Keyword(s):  
Categorical Imperative ◽  
The Self ◽  
Moral Law ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
The Law ◽  
As If

This essay shows how Derrida, in a variety of texts, engages directly or indirectly with the Kantian moral law, which rests on the assumption of man's autonomy vis-à-vis his natural inclinations. In the background of this analysis is Derrida's engagement with Freud, the latter having argued that the Kantian moral law is located in, and can be equated with, the superego. Derrida challenges Freud's assignation of the moral law (solely) to the superego, and suggests that what appears to Kant as the moral law and to Freud as the demands of the superego, already involve a limitation of a much more radical demand on the self: that of absolute sacrifice, and which one can understand with reference to Freud's death drive. This demand can be referred to as the law of law, that is, the law which makes of the moral law a law. Within this broader framework, the essay explores in detail Derrida's reading of Kant's notion of respect that is owed to the moral law, the notion of duty, and the formulation of the categorical imperative by Kant in terms of an ‘as if’.

The Thin Blue Line

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-154
Author(s):  
Robert Miklitsch
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
American Dream ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Law ◽  
Possessive Individualism ◽  
Police Detective ◽  
Blue Line ◽  
Line P

Despite the emphasis on the utter ubiquity of the underworld in the syndicate picture, one of the ironies of the subgenre is a certain “surplus of the law” in the chimerical shape of the organization. From this perspective, the rogue cop film constitutes a dialectical response to the totalitarian disposition of the syndicate picture. In a prototypical rogue cop film like Where the Sidewalk Ends, the problem represented by the syndicate is located in the protagonist’s unresolved relationship to his dead father, but in The Big Heat (1953) police detective Dave Bannion must defend the family and everything it represents--the ’50s suburban American Dream--against the violence-backed interests of the mob. If other working-class cops such as Chris Carmody in Rogue Cop (1954) are driven by sex, Webb Garwood in The Prowler (1951) and Barney Nolan in Shield for Murder (1954) are motivated by the desire for sex and money. In both The Prowler and Shield for Murder, the law of capital returns with the force of the repressed, and the bad cop becomes an especially perverted instance of possessive individualism.

The Speculative Turn

2019 ◽  
pp. 68-98
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of

This chapter argues that Sigmund Freud’s 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle marks a watershed in the history of psychoanalysis. Freud not only speculates in this text, he also speculates in a way that is far-reaching and far-ranging: his speculation takes him back to the origin of consciousness and the beginning of life. But what does it mean, this chapter asks, for Freud’s speculation to culminate in the hypothesis of a death or destructive drive? Indeed, what does it mean for Freud’s hypothesis of the repetition compulsion and the death drive to breathe new life into psychoanalytic theory? It is here, this chapter argues, that we must take Freud’s speculative play seriously and rethink not only psychoanalysis’s relation to philosophy (i.e., speculation) but also its relation to Plato. For Plato, more than any other philosopher in Freud’s work, plays a vital—literally a life-and-death—role in Freud’s theory of the drives.

The Trauma of Form: Death Drive as Affect in À la recherche du temps perdu

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robbie McLaughlan
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Artistic Creation ◽  
The Uncanny

This chapter brings contemporary Deleuzian understandings of affect into dialogue with those found in Freud. Arguing that Freud’s theorising of affect in many ways underpins the psychoanalytic project, the chapter suggests that, when seen through a Freudian lens, the sensory “planes of immanence” or perpetual becomings celebrated in contemporary affect theory resemble the repetition compulsion of trauma. The death drive is made explicit when we are confronted with the molecular, atomised or becoming and is manifested in the act of artistic creation. Following Derrida’s reading of Freud in The Postcard, the chapter formulates a psychoanalytic theory of the uncanny and traumatic affects of writing in relation to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, a text that makes manifest thanatos as a source of affect.

Intimate Relations: Psychoanalysis Deconstruction / La psychanalyse la déconstruction

Derrida Today ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 178-195
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Death Drive ◽  
Repetition Compulsion ◽  
Pleasure Principle ◽  
Chance Event ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
Time And Energy

This essay will concentrate, somewhat voyeuristically, on a particular and very special textual encounter. For if there is one text in the psychoanalytic tradition that will have caused Derrida to spill more ink than any other – it's Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). For ten years, from 1970–1980, Derrida returns not once but three times, on three separate occasions, in three different contexts, to Freud's text on repetition compulsion and the death drive, each time devoting more time and energy – that is to say, more pages – to it. As we will see in this essay, what emerges from this textual encounter is not only a new kind of pleasure; it is also a chance event of repetition that brings with it something strikingly new.

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