by Oliver Cutler | Vol 43 (1/2) 2025
Abstract: In this article, we present a reading of the desire staged in the British science fiction film Under the Skin (dir. Jonathan Glazer, 2013, UK). We argue that the dark lair in which the central character (an alluring alien played by Scarlett Johansson) dwells, is analogous to Lacan’s (1959-60 [2008]) revision of the Freudian ‘Thing’ (das Ding). Like other filmic representations of the monstrous, the alien illuminates the (ostensibly) contradictory movements of desire and disgust associated with the ‘monstrous feminine.’ Lacanian psychoanalysis is no stranger to this dynamic, and it provides a framework to understand the critique of patriarchist fantasy and sexualised violence the film presents. In the era of ‘consent culture’ and changing sexual attitudes and etiquette, the film is especially salient. Like the idealized Lady of courtly love, the alien is nothing, always veiled, and elevated to avoid the horrific encounter with das Ding. The alien’s body as limit, therefore, reveals how the Law, prohibition and desire operate and how the ‘lad’s mag’ trope of female sexuality indicates little more than the deficiency of patriarchist fantasy.
by Holly Haynes | Vol 40 (4) 2022
Summary: A letter to Tacitus from Pliny the Younger discusses length and brevity in forensic oratory. Pliny appears to argue in favor of length, but the letter’s deliberate ambiguities illuminate his larger theme as the responsibility of judicial rhetoric to shape the senatorial audience’s ethical response to tyranny. Pliny’s rhetorical theory shares with Lacanian psychoanalysis a therapeutic goal: subjects’ recognition of their relationship to the law as one of desire, free by virtue of their own (paradoxical) choice of subjectivity. This paper offers a theory of Pliny’s dialogic rhetoric as a kind of ‘talking cure’ rooted in the Socratic elenchus, and a historical example of the negotiation of the ‘forced choice’ proposed by Lacan in Seminar XI. It proposes the value of Lacan’s further conceptualization of the subject-Other relationship in terms of ‘traversing the fantasy’ for interpreting subjectivity in the particular circumstance of political tyranny.
by Slavoj Žižek | vol 39 (3) 2021
Abstract: Freud’s analysis of crowd psychology is the final result of the traumatic impact of the Great War. First, he introduced the notion of death-drive as the dimension beyond the pleasure-principle; then, he analyzed the formation of social groups which bring individuals to forsake their ‘rational’ behavior and surrender to self-destructive violence. Freud’s analysis should be supplemented by Lacan’s distinctions between superego, Ego- Ideal and ideal ego – through this triad, we can understand today’s rise of the new figure of obscene Master.
