The Truths of Psychoanalysis

Truth has always been a central philosophical category, occupying different fields of knowledge and practice. In the current moment of fake news and alternative facts, it is mandatory to revisit the various meanings of truth. Departing from various approaches to psychoanalytic theory and practice, the authors gathered in this book offer critical reflections and insights about truth and its effects. In articulations of psychoanalysis with (for instance) philosophy, ethics and politics, the reader will find discussions about issues such as knowledge, love, and clinical practice, all marked by the matter of truth.

The violence of the event: ontology, ethics, and politics in Zizek

The article presents the guidelines of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek’s ontology, in order to understand his unique conception of violence, as well as the respective ethical and political consequences. For him, violence is not necessarily destructive, as there is a productive form of violence: transcendental violence, which involves both breaking the coordinates and building the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a new event. However, although he came to formulate, based on the examples of Socrates, Jesus and Gandhi, the idea of a violent pacifism, Zizek does not distinguish between antagonism and agonistic and, thus, loses sight of the strategic possibility of an agonistic pacifism.

Thought and Political Judgment

Hannah Arendt’s claim that thinking is the last defense against the moral outrages of criminal political regimes sets the problematic of good and evil in relief. Human freedom, Paul Ricœur reminds us, is responsible for evil. The avowal of the evil of violence is thus the condition of our consciousness of the freedom to act anew.Aesthetic experience’s lateral transposition onto the planes of ethics and politics highlights our capacity to respond to exigencies in apposite ways. Exemplary representations of the good, the right, and the justexpress a desire for being. Eros is accordingly the law of every work, word, deed, or act that answers to a difficulty, challenge, or crisis. Bound to living experiences, thought attains its true height through interrogating, demystifying, and vacating frozen norms, standards, and mores. Judgment actualizes thought’s liberating effects in answer to the demands of the situations in which we find ourselves.

Allen Ginsberg’s Jeremiad

“Howl” continues to capture popular and academic imaginations. This article explores the categorical fault lines between modernist and postmodernist epistemologies as they are applied to Ginsberg’s poetic project. Reframing “religion” in postmodern terms, this article argues that even dominative categories and processes might be refashioned and deployed in the service of emancipatory and (counter)normative ethics and politics.

Violence, Wars, and the Possibility of Ethical Life in an Apocalypse: A Kantian Reading of The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is a popular TV series depicting a catastrophic and violent world. After a pandemic that turns humans into zombies, we witness the collapse of civilization with all its institutions, the depletion of the resources, and the struggle to build a new world in the middle of the wars between surviving groups. It illustrates a world of literal and metaphorical homo homini lupus. Some people choose sheer survival, and others try to build a moral, civil world. In this article, I propose a reading of this series from a Kantian perspective by employing his interrelated ideas on history, ethics, and politics. I claim that The Walking Dead represents the state of nature and the violence it contains, and illustrates the course of history toward a civil society as defined by Kant.

The separation between ethics and politics: Max Weber on ancient Judaism and modernity

For Max Weber, modernity is characterized by a tragic conflict among value spheres, each claiming to possess the ‘true meaning’ of human life. In particular, Weber argues that while the political sphere is dominated by the unifying, exclusionary, power-driven, and war-prone nation state, the ethical sphere is characterized by the universalization of individually based, deontological norms. For Weber, I argue, the modern separation between the ethical and political spheres originates in ancient Judaism. His work on Judaism, mostly neglected by political theorists, describes the emergence of politics as an autonomous, naturalistic sphere with the establishment of kingship. Biblical prophets, simultaneously, were the inventors of an idealistic, mulish, universal ethics Weber termed the ‘ethics of ultimate ends’. Thus, against the Greek model harmonizing ethics and politics, Judaism invented an antagonistic model of the two. This Jewish imagination lay dormant for almost two millennia but returned to the stage in secularized modernity.

Philia: the biological foundations of Aristotle’s ethics

This article is the first one to offer an investigation, from a biological perspective, of “natural philia” or “kin-based” philia (commonly translated as “friendship”) in Aristotle’s practical philosophy. After some preliminary considerations about its place in Aristotle’s ethical treatises, the discussion focuses on Aristotle’s biology. Here we learn that natural philia, couched in terms of a biological praxis rather than a trait of character, is widespread in the animal kingdom, although in different ways and to varying degrees. To account for such differences, Aristotle establishes a Scala Philiae in two different biological texts—Historia Animalium and Generation of Animals—where natural bonds in animals are classified in view of their strength and duration. Each level of Aristotle’s Scala is examined. Finally, the argument returns to Aristotle’s ethical and political texts, drawing greater attention to the biological mechanisms that underlie natural philia in human beings. I conclude that natural philia provides one fundamental biological building-block of Aristotle’s ethics and politics.