Marcuse’s Contribution to Political Thought: On Potentiality, Pre-enactment, and the Surrealism of Liberation

Among theorists associated with the first generation of the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse’s position is singular in that he provides us with an unabashedly affirmative theory of politics as liberatory practice. The article discusses Marcuse’s contribution to political thought by pointing out how, in particular, three aspects remain highly pertinent to contemporary thought: (a) his account of freedom as potentiality, to be actualized in political practice; (b) his conception of the political pre-figuration or pre-enactment of a liberated society; and (c) his rehabilitation of the human faculty of imagination that allows us to overcome the reality principle of the status quo by venturing, qua practice, into the realm of the revolutionary surreal, thereby enlarging the horizon of what is politically imaginable. In a final step Marcuse’s contribution is contrasted with contemporary theories of the political.

Fictional truth

A well-known theory about under which circumstances a statement is true in a fiction is the Reality Principle (RP), which originates in the work of David Lewis: “(RP) Where p1…pn are the primary fictional truths of a fiction F, it is true in F that q iff the following holds: were p1…pn the case, q would have been the case” (Walton 1990, 44). RP has been subjected to a number of counterexamples, up to a point where, in the words of Stacie Friend (2017, 33), “it is widely recognized that the Reality Principle […] cannot be a universal inference rule for implied story-truths”. This chapter argues that the strength of these counterexamples is widely overestimated, and that they do not, on closer scrutiny, constitute reasons for rejecting RP.

Realist Pace

Reality principle, reality effect: those two notions—psychoanalytical, narratological, epistemological—have determined our understanding of nineteenth-century literature explicitly for at least half a century. But perhaps they were both, after all, functions of narrative pace. That is what this chapter begins by arguing: that what we consider to be realism is largely a function of pace that mediates between two senses of scene. Scene, like summary, is not an altogether coherent unit. One must acknowledge that it is split between a dramatic-presentational aspect and a pictorial-representational one and that that split is decisive for how realist narrative defines its movement. The central example here is Middlemarch, with Balzac and Flaubert in the near background. But the chapter ends by looking far forward, considering the capacity of narrative fiction to pause and to speak to its reader, from Fielding and Eliot to Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison.

Comment’s on Philip Percival’s “Beyond Reality?”

Percival is interested in what Kierland and Monton (2007: 487) call the “Reality Principle”: (RP) Reality consists, and only consists, in things and how things are. He is interested in two different ways in which the all-encompassing conception of reality suggested by this principle may be challenged. We may, on the one hand, wish to restrict reality to only some of the things or to only some of the ways in which things are. This is how my reality predicate from QO and my reality operator from QR work; they effect a division within things or within how things are. We may, on the other hand, wish to allow for something beyond the things or how things are and hence beyond reality itself if reality only consists in things and how things are. Percival considers a number of different ways in which each of these two restrictive conceptions of reality might play out and he considers a striking application of the second conception to the case of time: for under a certain restrictive version of presentism, one may wish to claim both that reality consists in present things or how things presently are and that the past is somehow beyond reality as so conceived....

Wounds of the Past: Andrei Tarkovsky and the Melancholic Imagination

This chapter provides a psychoanalytically-inflected analysis of the complex nature of Tarkovsky’s melancholia as the predominant affect in his films, functioning as a poetic critique of the reality principle, eschewing our symbolic separation from the Thing. Engaging with the theories of melancholia developed by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Julia Kristeva, the authors trace its various configurations in Tarkovsky’s last three Soviet films: Solaris (1972) exhibits the melancholic clinging to the impossible past brought about by narcissistic withdrawal and interminable mourning; Mirror (1974) dramatizes the impossible return to a pre-symbolic childhood; the story of Stalker (1979) circulates around the unknown that grounds the world of the melancholic.

Realismo e historia

This article argues that the reality principle must be accepted as a necessary condition for any adequate historical research. The first part explores the arguments of the hermeneutical realism, in order to rescue some of them and showing their importance for the historical theory. The second part reconstructs a debate between historical theory, literary theory, linguistic turn and hermeneutical realism, aiming to expose the risks of anti-realism for the historical discipline. At the end, it is expected to present a perspective that points out what is the meaning of rescue realist elements that supports a not arbitrary historical research.

The Ego’s Attention and the Therapist’s Attention to Reality in Freud. At the Threshold of Ethics

This article aims to show that the practice of attention can create an openness to the truth, from where ethics arises. It does so by exploring the role attention plays, according to Ricoeur, in Freud’s thought. Ricoeur shows how in the first stage of Freud’s thinking – that of the Project of a Scientific Psychology – attention is one of the instances in which a purely mechanical quantitative explanation can be questioned. Further on, with the introduction of narcissism, Ricœur shows that attention, insofar as it opens a space for the “wounding truth,” opposes narcissism. Finally, the article explains how in the therapeutic setting an attentional epochē allows the therapist to be “the reality principle in flesh and in act,” so that the ego can gain control. According to Ricœur, this non-judgmental gaze opens a space of truthfulness for the patient’s self-knowledge which, although not being the totality of ethics, constitutes its threshold.