Beware thy neighbour

Modern Theology, 2020

This essay serves to introduce a special edition of the journal Modern Theology on the political significance of loving your enemies. The essay also explores key themes in the ongoing discussion and asserts that friendship has an important place in the political order if we are going to rightly love our enemies.

An extract from Jacques Lacan: A Critical Introduction by Martin Murray

2003

Unless otherwise noted, all citations from the Pentateuch are from Sarna, ed., The JPS Torah and Commentary (in English and Hebrew). Other biblical citations are from May and Metzger, eds., The Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version.

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017

Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this recent work he explores concepts of love in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature, with an emphasis on the theories of Freud and Lacan. His wide-ranging approach takes up questions of desire, passion, infatuation, sexuality, durable love, and their cultural and historical variations. Along the way, he comments on popular culture and clinical material to convey the myths and mysteries of these universal human experiences. Fink does not attempt a comprehensive review of the subject, omitting, for example, Bergmann's important work on repetition and regression in relationships (1982, 1988) and Kernberg's object relations approach to love (1998). Nor does he cover the varied formulations suggested by Lacan over his long career. Fink focuses principally on Lacan's reading of Plato's Symposium in his Seminar VIII, in which he develops a model of transference love. Both Freud and Lacan had a lot of things to say about love and its role in psychoanalysis. Freud famously discussed love triangles, the tension between object love and narcissism, the separation of sexual from tender feelings, and the residues of oedipal conflicts in intimate relationships. In his early period, Lacan replaced libidinal motives with the phenomenological notion of a desire that cannot be reduced to drives or object relations, but is inherent in intersubjectivity. "Man's desire is the desire of the Other," he wrote, borrowing from Hegel's ambiguous phrase. To imitate or fulfill the Other's desire, however, evokes a childish wish for union, not the limited satisfactions of an actual relationship with another subject. In this regard, Lacan distinguished between imaginary love, seeking fusional mirroring of an ideal self, and symbolic love, which accepts incompleteness and separation. The tension between the two makes 695262A PAXXX10.

Resling publishing, 2009

http://www.resling.co.il/book.asp?series_id=&book_id=531&back=catalog

Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 2017

Jacques Lacan’s theory of the subject is put forward in order to correct what the author calls “the naïve theory of the subject,” which sociologists of religion tend to utilize by default in numerous quantitative sociological studies based on mass surveys and oriented towards obtaining exact, scientific, positivistic knowledge. This article applies Lacan’s three registers—Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real—to the religious sphere and demonstrates their potential implications for the sociological analysis of religion. An analysis of the empirical research on Russia’s post-Soviet religious situation reinforces the author’s argument that an uncritical theory of the subject attends only to the superficial layers of the subject, which end up being devoid of actual subjectivity, according to Lacanian logic. The more fundamental layers of the subject, capable of making it “the subject” in the full sense of the word, seem to be completely outside of sociologists’ current field of vision. This critique directs the reader’s attention to the shortcomings of sociological surveys, and the author argues that a more robust understanding of the subject could enrich the sociology of religion, particularly by further developing certain conceptions, such as Grace Davie’s “vicarious religion.”

"Lacan In Public: Psychoanalysis And The Science Of Rhetoric." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 17.2 (2014): 374-378.