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Focusing on Stefan Zweig’ novel Chess Story/Royal Game (in German – Schachnovelle), this essaydescribes some anthropological and social features that transform the chess game into a struggle against others and against the self.
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The article discusses the paradigm of cultural collision between East and West, artistically articulated in Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, The Red-Haired Woman. The novel is a fictional inquiry into the literary foundations of civilizations, and compares two myths, fundamental respectively for the West and the East – Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (a story of patricide) and Ferdowsi’s tale of Rostam and Sohrab (a story of filicide). The article highlights the worthy and courageous message contained in Pamuk’s novel.
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Our study will question the way in which the filmmaker David Cronenberg deals with the theme of incest. in several of his films. Although this taboo is central to works such as "Maps to the stars" or "Faux-Semblants", it also has considerable symbolic and metaphorical meaning that it would be boring to conceal. We will see how the director of "Videodrome" succeeds in mixing intimacy with symbolic within a work more amoral than immoral.
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The study is centered on the question of aesthetical experience and one of its specific elements, tranquility. The question arises whether tranquility can be thought of conceptually as a category, and whether it can be conceived of in the purest aesthetic perspective or, to the contrary, will continue to be seen as ethical. Is tranquility an essential condition for the realization of the aesthetic experience or is it rather the essential purpose and meaning of that experience? How should we perceive tranquility – as an inherent quality of the work of art, as part of the aesthetic experience, or as a goal in the overall meaning of art ?! The category is considered in the persectives of both Western and Eastern aesthetics (examples of Haiku poetry). The analysis leads to a number of unexpected results.
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This paper offers the basic theses behind the concept of narcissistic distortion, which can take place in two directions – the paper explains subject formation and experience in so-called concave and convex narcissistic mirroring. The theory proposed in this paper largely relies on Lacan's mirror stage, and on his contribution to subject's development of self-consciousness through constitutive-imaginary dimensions of subjectivity. In cases of inserted concave or convex distortion, the subject locates themselves in the place of the Other, by identifying themselves with their own distorted mirror image in the Other. These distortions influence subject formation in a very concrete manner, carrying over the predisposition for certain instabilities in latter mirroring. The paper is illustrated with a case study aimed at easier understanding of the approach offered in it. It also provides a critical reflection on the possibility of plane mirror formation, as well as a detailed designation of convex distortion and four positions of concave narcissistic distortion.
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As a psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan differentiated in his late period (starting from 1960) between the impossibility of symbolic representation covering the real (le réel) and the enjoyment (jouissance), which only partially subject itself to such signifiers and therefore generates a real residue – i.e. the “object a”. This “object a”, which differs from the imaginary object, represents a non-assimilable excess occurring as the cause of desire (désir). On the other hand, it refers back to the intrinsically concealed presence of “object a” as the origin of fear. In this way, the desire appears puzzling and solidifies itself in the phantasm of the “partial object” (Freud), which is believed to be the “Other” (A). The psychoanalytic cure consists in crossing this phantasm in order to give up the original identification; that is, to see the tension between the desire for recognition and the demand of the need (besoin) and thereby to dissolve it. For Lacan, the Freudian unconscious is thus a simultaneous opening and closing, the pulsation of which excludes depth and inwardness. Insofar as the subject is split between the singular truth of desire and a general knowledge about it, this truth really comes to speech only when is acknowledged the fact that “no language can ever tell the truth about the truth”.
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The paper discusses the question of human subjectivity as defined by René Descartes (1596-1650) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). It examines the similarities as well as differences between the selfconscious and rational Cartesian subject, and the unconscious Lacanian subject (subject as desire and subject as drive). Further, it applies these categories to the subsequent discussion on the psychotic subject. Taking a rhetorical perspective means that the Cartesian and Lacanian subjects are considered an effect of specific tropological processes, such as the mechanisms of metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, or catachresis. As it turns out, an analysis of rhetorical tropes allows us to uncover the unconscious linguistic mechanisms governing the formation of the human subject. Despite the obvious differences between the concepts of subjectivity in Cartesian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis, there is a common denominator: it is due to the process of metaphorical substitution that the human subject comes into being.
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Borowicz analyses Jerzy Krzyszoń’s novel Obłęd [Madness], treating it not only as a literary testimony of the experience of psychosis, but also as an expression of the social conflicts that marked Poland after March 1968. The first part of the article is concerned with a psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis and the possibility of its linguistic recording, whereas the second part places the fears and hallucinations described in the novel in their historical context. Obłęd [Madness] can be seen as an unexpected literary reaction to the anti-Semitic campaign of March 1968 which suggests another, more inclusive, understanding of Polish identity.
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2018 is a distinguished year regarding the fate and publication of the literary, albanological, linguistic and cultural works of the Albanian writer and intellectual Mid’hat Frashëri, otherwise known with his literary pseudonym Lumo Skendo. During this year, his work was completed and systematized in various volumes. Sparse writings on various periodicals - some of whom he helped in establishing and directed himself, but also new writings, unknown till now, taken out of archives are presented for the first time to the researchers of the present author. Vepra të zgjedhura, Vëllimi 3, (Selected Opera, Edition 3) published by the passionate researcher Uran Butka, brings a fundamental contribution to the recognition, reading and discovery of the profile of Lumo Skendo, who is taking its deserved place in the hierarchy of the values of our literary system. In one of the new poetical prose, titled “Ëndërrimtari” (“The Dreamer”, 1920) Lumo Skëndo, now from his most preferred and most wanted position – which means that of the Dreamer, finishes his text with a long and sincere prayer: "Oh, please, let me, let me keep intact my vital confidence and belief, let me suppose that nothing around me has changed so far; for I delight most in dreaming, and reality I'm leaving to you." The diverse manifestations of the dream and its variations derived by a specific relationship between the Lyrical Ego and the object of desire, in all the collection of poetical prose (around 70 pieces) will be the object of our study. The focus of our research work will be the text, because within the text are found the characteristic traits of the author's style. We hope they will bring interesting results for the greater knowledge on various aspects of the prose poetics and literary works of Lumo Skëndo.
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Between the littoral slopes of Velebit, south of Senj, stretches Podgorje, which in global dimensions could freely be described as the foothill of the Croatian Tibet. Moreover, our prematurely departed ethnologist and anthropologist, Tomo Vinšćak, who visited both heaven touchingpoints, claimed that Kailash and Velebit were mountain relatives – the Himalayan and Croatian Olympus (1991). In this paper the need of a coherent familiarisation of the specificity of this region and its people will be brought up and also argued for with the same persistence from ground level insights (with experience). So if it is seemingly possible to define the foothill of the Croatian Olympus (with a lack of empirical comparison) as a pretentious idealisation, it remains the factography of many disciplines, which synergistically rearranged allow a less depressing interpretation of the region by its people.In this paper such a scientific association is sought to be reached with the intertwining of the use of anthropological perspectives (emic-etic) and a Jungian analysis of an empirical archetypal sequence that links the author with this region.This is a region of the frequent collective forgetfulness of all the historiographic facts, which confirm that despite the harshness of nature which has poured the 'bura' and drought down here over the centuries, and the description that from this region people just escaped and disappeared because of the difficulty of life, it has remained a junction of numerous peoples and populations.The anchor point of many cultural, sacral and imaginative dimensions for Croats, just like one of the final destinations of the largest Croatian migratory flows. In today’s literal and trite postmodernistic interpretations – a region of multicultural encounters despite the in loco of the difficult narratives of life. Following the same superficiality, it also becomes a region for a brief drop by in the manner of an altogether ritual form of an expedition at the challenge of the wilderness – from the touristic branding of wandering through Velebit, under the motto of the preservation of untameable nature, to the altogether planned experience of being beaten by the 'bura' on the quayside of Senj. In order that everything mentioned is not left to just an eco(nomic)historical search of symbolism,metaphors and bricolages of myths, it would be good here to widen the interpretation of the specificity of the locality and to add the reality of bio-cultural history. Thus, the contributions of the research of many kinds of disciplines in the area of medicine have for decades already pointed to a kind of, let’s say, paradox of the Podgorje specificity,which is reflected in the contrast of a place of hard living compared to a desired place to live out old age or if wanted cosmologically and less anthropocentrically, an old age of open-ended enjoyment and comfort. The final aim of the analysis of this paper is the (re)direction of the possible interests for Podgorje with the touristic-exotic-profitable colonial matrices onto a cosmological-ethical understanding in which the interconnection of man, nature and history deserves a much wider perception of its 'endurance'instead of 'sustainability' or 'revitalisation'. With the cosmological approach said, each equation of neoliberal comfort here is inapplicable, quite the opposite, it is reversely proportionate to the historical and biocultural evidence. To conclude – nothing surprising in relation to the possibility of the interpretation of this region as the foothill of the Croatian Olympus.
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Inspired by the work of Eric Santner (1996, 2011) on political theology and the king’s two bodies, in this paper, I question the political theology of film. I analyze how the carnal dimension of sovereignty (or king’s second body, the body of his power), migrates into a new body, the body of the people, and in various traces appears in the filmic mode of production that marked the twentieth century. I analyse or instead bring into imaginary connection two characters (one real, the other fictional) who in a way embody this migration: (1) Judge Daniel Paul Schreber (whose autobiographical record of mental illness, from the moment it was published (in 1903), occupied the attention not only of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts but also of various theorists) and (2) Dr. Caligari, a hypnotist in the film The Office of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920), one of the most famous characters of German expressionist film.
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Focusing on the psychiatric case of Miloš Krpan, one of our first socialists and anarchists who was twice admitted to the Royal Institute for Mentally Insane in Stenjevec at the end of the 19th century, the paper aims to show how, by participating in the construction of Croatian civil society, psychiatry develops medical knowledge but also normalizes power. Psychiatry pacifies the resistance against the system by dislocating it to the Institute where it is further examined, processed, mastered and disciplined. At the same time, it acquires scientific legitimacy and gains social status by producing a category of the abnormal and by developing techniques to repress it. Thus, it assumes responsibility for social morale, security and purity, and by associating itself with judicial practice it becomes one of the main legal authorities. In other words, apart from seeking to cure insanity, psychiatry emerges as an apparatus of social discipline and establishes modern forms of normalizing power in the young bourgeois capitalist society of the second half of the 19th century.
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The article considers the highly critical handling of the British brand of messianism in Graham Swift’s novel Waterland (1983) in the light of Jacques Lacan’s concept of the phallus. The issue is approached through the figure of the narrator’s half-brother, spawned to be the saviour of the world and the narrator’s attitude towards promises of a grand future, an epitome of Graham Swift’s overall distrust of totalising narratives. The desire for a complete and final explanation is shown to be as inescapable as it is impossible to fulfil.
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In this paper I shall try to explain the term reflexive project of the self, as seen by Anthony Giddens. What is reflexive project of the self? How and why does it happen? What is its definition? How does it manifest itself in everyday life and in human relationships? These are some of the questions I shall try to answer in the paper. We live in a posttraditional society. Norms, values and systems which were valid in traditional societies aren’t important in lives of individuals any longer. The disappearance of clear models and principles of behaviour on both personal and broader social level, forces an individual to look for answers elsewhere and to create their identity in a different way than before. On personal level, this manifests itself in increased and transformed reflexivity, directed towards the creation of personality through close personal monitoring. The process going on in thus modified reflexivity Giddens calls reflexive project of the self. It happens through constant monitoring and results in the trajectory of the self.
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In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher borrows Jacques Derrida’s term hauntology and repurposes it to describe a sense of a lost futurity haunting contemporary music. He singles out party hauntology as a specific subset of hauntology in pop music in which uneasiness looms behind a facade of excess and pleasure. This paper revamps Fisher’s term by focusing on the music of the Canadian artist The Weeknd. Exhibiting what Fisher terms depressive hedonia and interpassivity, The Weeknd is an example of the retreat into privatized suffering which cannot recognize its social character. However, the paper goes further by arguing that The Weeknd’s music possesses an eerie quality due to a clash between upbeat, dance rhythms and dark lyrics which depict The Weeknd’s constant plunging into recreational sex and drugs although they do not satisfy him. As Fisher explains, the eerie is necessarily bound up with issues of agency and the paper will argue that the invisible agent behind The Weeknd’s compulsive repetition is the death drive understood as Žižekian undead wandering around in guilt. Ultimately, as the mechanisms of capitalism in itself operate by the rules of the death drive, it will be shown that,due to his inability to understand his place in the system and submission to the necrocratic symbolic order, The Weeknd’s music is the perfect soundtrack to the capitalist realist regime.
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Over time, continuous efforts have been made to clarify and circumscribe diagnoses of autism, schizophrenia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The diagnostic split between the 3 disorders dominated psychiatry after the 80s, being still used and recognized as such by the diagnostic manuals. Recently a shift and flexibility of the psychiatric paradigm has been noticed. The categorical perspective on mental illness is gradually complemented by the dimensional one. In the last decade, research in the field of neuroscience and psychology has brought evidence in favor of a partial overlap between ADHD, autism and schizophrenia. The hypothesis of a partial overlap can also be supported by non-medical or psychological theorizations, related to common deficits of symbolic structuring of the psyche in achieving a coherent representation of the world and of one's own person.
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In their narratives, Assia Djebar, Maïssa Bey, Leila Aslaoui and Yamina Benguigui frequently feature female characters that experience feelings of inferiority and unworthiness, of shame and guilt, potentially leading to real identity crises. Given the opportunity to make themselves heard, these fictional women express the unspoken and the taboo. Psychoanalysis, social criticism and auto-fiction interpretation applied to the above mentioned texts are efficient in pinpointing the subordinate status of Algerian women. This article will focus on the female identity lacking or having little access to education, freedom of speech and movement, equal rights and marital happiness, and consequently falling into shame and guilt, as described in four Algerian works, covering the period between the 1930s and the 2000s.
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In Orhan Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat, it is mentioned about a life which can be considered as meaningful by being converted to a fiction by the protagonist, Osman. The cycle of journey occurs in the dark depths of Osman’s subconscious. This cycle bears the signs of rootlessness, desire for liberation, and desire to become a ‘subject’. The image of angel pursued during these journeys points to Osman’s desire to find his existential meaning through an imagined ‘other’ associated with innocence and childhood, to build his identity and to be complete. During these journeys, the angelic image, which appears continuously as a way of salvation, refers to the desire to return to the paradise lost and mother figure; as well as the purification of sin. Eventually, this vicious cycle points to the process of Osman’s self-realization, self-recognition and self-discovery. Thereafter, he completes his ego and become a ‘subject’. In this article, a psychoanalytic review on Orhan Pamuk’s Yeni Hayat with the help of Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s theoretical perspectives on anxiety, id-ego-superego, creative writers and day-dreaming, psychoneurosis and mirror stage will be expounded.
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The present study aims to determine whether religiosity affects hedonic consumption behavior, which expresses pleasure-oriented consumption behavior, and wasteful consumption behavior, which expresses waste-oriented consumption behavior, and whether hedonic consumption behavior has an effect on wasteful consumption behavior. For this purpose, the convenience sampling method was chosen among the sampling methods, and the data was collected with the online questionnaire form. During the data collection process, 490 participants were reached, but as a result of the removal of incorrect questionnaires, the data of 481 participants were included in the analysis. In the analysis of the obtained data, frequency analysis, factor analysis, and Structural Equation Model analysis were performed by using SPSS 21 and AMOS 24 programs. As a result of the study, it was determined that religiosity has a negative effect on hedonic consumption behavior and wasteful consumption behavior, while hedonic consumption behavior has a positive effect on wasteful consumption.
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