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Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis
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Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787). This special issue belongs to the section "Transdisciplinary Humanities".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 September 2023) | Viewed by 11714

Special Issue Editors

Prof. Dr. Michael Levine

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Guest Editor
Department of German, Russian and East European Languages, Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
Interests: literature; philosophy; psychoanalysis
Prof. Dr. Isabelle Alfandary

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Guest Editor
Professor of American Literature and Critical Theory, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, 75005 Paris, France
Interests: literature; philosophy; psychoanalysis
Prof. Dr. Alessia Ricciardi

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Guest Editor
Department of French and Italian, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA
Interests: literature; philosophy; psychoanalysis

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Historically, the encounters between literature and psychoanalysis, on the one hand, and philosophy and psychoanalysis, on the other, have been fraught in different and yet mutually illuminating ways.  In both cases, the limits of these encounters have been at once methodological and geopolitical.    

From a methodological perspective, the confrontation between literature and psychoanalysis has often run the risk of devolving into a prescriptive application of one discipline to another.  When psychoanalysis came into being in Freud’s theory, the world had not yet been marked by the concerns of globalization, decolonization, and climate change as ours is.  If both psychoanalysis and literature reflect on and reimagine the conditions of the good life, the terms in which they work have all too often been framed within an exclusively Eurocentric perspective.  In what ways can literature help psychoanalysis begin to address non-European forms of belonging as well? Conversely, can literature cease to regard psychoanalysis as an external discourse that ultimately represents a hermeneutic threat?  How may psychoanalysis and literature enable each other to discover surprising and productive articulations of questions of philosophy, ethics, law, and politics?    

The relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis has been no less vexed, with philosophy, especially in its analytic mode, seeking to evaluate its truth claims and possibilities of verification in its encounters with psychoanalysis. Freud always remained bracingly skeptical about metaphysical explanations, while Lacan conducted a sustained theoretical flirtation with linguistics and philosophy that in its claims was audacious and inspiring, yet over time seems largely to have been abandoned. The British school of psychoanalysis exemplifies differing and not always easily reconcilable impulses, apparently coalescing around Klein and Winnicott and their philosophical modesty while at the same time giving rise to Bion’s Wittgensteinian project of producing a sort of psychoanalytic Tractatus. Against the background of this complex theoretical itinerary, is it still possible today to triangulate between philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis in ways that may be productive and also unexpected?  Can these encounters open up new areas of intervention that are reflective of richer and more diverse forms of life while also being respectful of, and attentive to, the ways in which they manifest their singularity? This is the challenge we have before us as critics, and one this Special Issue of Humanities, entitled “Literature, Psychoanalysis and Philosophy”, seeks to address.  

Prof. Dr. Michael Levine
Prof. Dr. Isabelle Alfandary
Prof. Dr. Alessia Ricciardi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Published Papers (9 papers)

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Research

16 pages, 348 KiB  
Article
To Speak with the Other—To Let the Other Speak: Paul Celan’s Poetry and the Hermeneutical Challenge of Mitsprechen
by Alexandra Richter
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 66; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030066 - 24 Apr 2024
Viewed by 598
Abstract
This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or “with-speaking” in Paul Celan’s poetry. “With-speaking” supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan’s notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of [...] Read more.
This essay explores the notion of Mitsprechen or “with-speaking” in Paul Celan’s poetry. “With-speaking” supposes that voices in the poems actively participate and engage in a dialogue that goes beyond traditional hermeneutic frameworks. Celan’s notion of col-loquy, distinct from the conventional sense of dialogue, challenges the separation between author and interpreter, rendering the traditional concept of intertextuality inadequate. The poems, according to Celan, give voice to human destinies, making texts audible as the voices of others. This vocal dimension of Celan’s poetry has prompted extensive discussion among philosophers, particularly in France. Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, influenced by German phenomenology and hermeneutics, critically examine the ethical implications of speaking “about” the other. They challenge traditional hermeneutical practices, emphasizing the responsibility of interpreters to respect the unique and untranslatable character of individual voices. This critique extends to Protestant categories of interpretation, drawing on alternative Jewish perspectives on being-in-the-world and alterity. The text explores the tensions inherent in speaking “for” or “in the name of” others, especially in the context of interpreting Celan’s work, raising questions about maintaining the fundamental difference and distance that otherness implies. The discussion concludes by highlighting Werner Hamacher’s formulation of a new philology that disrupts hermeneutical violence, influenced by the critiques of Blanchot, Levinas, and Derrida, and offering an alternative way of addressing the particular challenges posed by Celan’s poetry. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
12 pages, 278 KiB  
Article
For a Psychoanalysis of the Flesh
by Domietta Torlasco
Humanities 2024, 13(2), 45; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13020045 - 05 Mar 2024
Viewed by 1020
Abstract
This essay takes the notion of “flesh” as the point of departure for exploring the viability and contemporary relevance of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “ontological psychoanalysis”. Primary interlocutors will be Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Hortense Spillers’s essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s [...] Read more.
This essay takes the notion of “flesh” as the point of departure for exploring the viability and contemporary relevance of what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “ontological psychoanalysis”. Primary interlocutors will be Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred and Hortense Spillers’s essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
19 pages, 284 KiB  
Article
Reconsidering Freud’s Uncanny: The Coppola Perspective
by Samuel Weber
Humanities 2024, 13(1), 4; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010004 - 22 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1198
Abstract
This essay reconsiders the Freudian notion of the Uncanny/Unheimlich by focusing on the attempt of the ego to project and maintain a coherent and consistent view of the world and of itself—an attempt that is intrinsically subverted by the very process of repetition [...] Read more.
This essay reconsiders the Freudian notion of the Uncanny/Unheimlich by focusing on the attempt of the ego to project and maintain a coherent and consistent view of the world and of itself—an attempt that is intrinsically subverted by the very process of repetition that both conditions and disrupts all forms of identity and of identification. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
11 pages, 262 KiB  
Article
Is a Purloined Letter Just Writing? Burrowing in the Lacan-Derrida Archive
by Jean-Michel Rabaté
Humanities 2023, 12(6), 146; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060146 - 11 Dec 2023
Viewed by 1363
Abstract
Starting from a recent book on Derrida and psychoanalysis, I return to the controversy between Lacan and Derrida in the 1970s. Its focus was the letter as interpreted by Lacan in a commentary of Poe’s “Purloined Letter”. While agreeing with some of Derrida’s [...] Read more.
Starting from a recent book on Derrida and psychoanalysis, I return to the controversy between Lacan and Derrida in the 1970s. Its focus was the letter as interpreted by Lacan in a commentary of Poe’s “Purloined Letter”. While agreeing with some of Derrida’s objections, I conclude that Lacan makes stronger points about the destination of the letter. I give my own example, Kafka’s “Letter to the Father” in order to argue that one can state that “a letter always reaches its destination” even if it has not been delivered. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
10 pages, 251 KiB  
Article
Törleß and the Scene of Reading
by Dominik Zechner
Humanities 2023, 12(6), 136; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060136 - 13 Nov 2023
Viewed by 1160
Abstract
The article reads Robert Musil’s debut novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless) (1906) as a novel of the institution (Campe) in which diverse forms of violence are intertwined. Contrary to the assumption that Musil’s novel aims [...] Read more.
The article reads Robert Musil’s debut novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless) (1906) as a novel of the institution (Campe) in which diverse forms of violence are intertwined. Contrary to the assumption that Musil’s novel aims at the depiction of sado-masochistic transgressions, my argument focuses on a reading scene that mediates the novel’s various potentials of violence: only when Törleß reads Kant does it become clear which violence and which pain are meant by Musil’s text. The experience of reading becomes a masochistic act in the course of which the pleasure of the text is recast in terms of a negative textual jouissance. Musil’s novel, in turn, becomes readable not as an exhibition of schoolboys in disgrace, but as an exploration of the violent structure of practical reason itself. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
10 pages, 269 KiB  
Article
Making Words—The Unconscious in Translation: Philosophical, Psychoanalytical, and Philological Approaches
by Judith Kasper
Humanities 2023, 12(6), 127; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12060127 - 27 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1234
Abstract
The topic of the article is the status of translation and homophony in philosophy, psychoanalysis and philology. The article focuses on the question of how translation is carried out using the basic principle of equivalence of meaning by homophony and what effects this [...] Read more.
The topic of the article is the status of translation and homophony in philosophy, psychoanalysis and philology. The article focuses on the question of how translation is carried out using the basic principle of equivalence of meaning by homophony and what effects this can produce. The analysis of two case studies by Freud and Lacan shows that homophonic transfer from one language to another can be extremely productive for the subjective traversal of a phantasm. It is then shown that this is not, however, of purely subjective interest. Werner Hamacher has sketched the future of philology starting from such homophonic translations; Lacan has tried to advance to another theory of language through homophonic formations. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
12 pages, 281 KiB  
Article
The Purloined Letters of Elizabeth Bishop
by Axel Nesme
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 117; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050117 - 12 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1077
Abstract
In this paper I propose to examine several poems by Elizabeth Bishop through the prism of the concept of letter delineated in “Lituraterre”, where Lacan explores the connection between the literal and the littoral in order to draw a key distinction between signifiers [...] Read more.
In this paper I propose to examine several poems by Elizabeth Bishop through the prism of the concept of letter delineated in “Lituraterre”, where Lacan explores the connection between the literal and the littoral in order to draw a key distinction between signifiers which are the semblances involved in ordinary communication, and the letter as a precipitate resulting from their breakdown. Insofar as the letter causes “writing effects that are structured around moments of vacillation of semblances” (M-H Roche), such effects may be traced in poems where Bishop focuses on how meaning is set adrift by eliding, displacing or transforming graphemes and phonemes. Her observation that “the names of seashore towns run out to sea” points to the littoral/liminal space of the poetic signifier that straddles enjoyment and meaning. I analyze Bishop’s painterly treatment of mist through the prism of Lacan’s discussion of Japanese calligraphy where the unary brush stroke, which “is the means to clear original Chaos” (E. Laurent), operates as the equivalent of the median void, often represented by fog in Chinese painting, i.e., as an avatar of the littoral that separates knowledge from enjoyment. I conclude with a reading of a poem where the semiosis of mortality hinges on the (dis-)appearance of certain phonemes, inviting us to question the literal/literary destiny of letters when they turn into Joycean litter, and prompting us to revisit Lacan’s familiar aphorism that “a letter always reaches its destination”. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
14 pages, 327 KiB  
Article
Joking Around, Seriously: Freud, Derrida, and the Irrepressible Wit of Heinrich Heine
by Elizabeth Rottenberg
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 113; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050113 - 08 Oct 2023
Viewed by 1308
Abstract
This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find [...] Read more.
This essay sets out to explore the unexpected but amusing entanglement of three Jewish writers—Harry (“Heinrich”) Heine, Sigismund (“Sigmund”) Freud, and Jackie (“Jacques”) Derrida. You will not often find a reference to Heine in the work of Jacques Derrida, but you will find a Heine joke in Derrida’s discussion of forgiveness in Le parjure et le pardon (1998–1999), where the name Heine is invoked precisely in order to recall the scandalous automaticity, the machine-like quality of forgiveness. Beginning with Derrida’s surprising reference to the man George Eliot called a “unique German wit”, this essay will begin by arguing that there is something about Heine’s jokes, his Witze, his mots d’esprit, that not only plays up, but also paradoxically takes seriously, what Derrida, echoing Nietzsche in Of Grammatology, describes as the “play of the world.” The second part of this essay will engage Freud’s particular and quite special relation to Heine: Heine is the third most cited German writer in all of Freud’s work (after Goethe and Schiller). Neither Homer nor Sophocles is cited more often than Heine. Indeed, a bon mot from Heine is always ready-to-hand in the face of theoretical obstacles (e.g., “Observations on Transference Love”, “On Narcissism”, etc.). But perhaps nowhere is Freud’s affinity with Heine more apparent and more striking than in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), where Heine’s witticisms offer the best and most canonical examples of jokes. In conclusion, this essay will argue that Heine’s wit can be read as a playbook—not only for psychoanalysis’s economic understanding of jokes, but also, more radically, for deconstruction’s thinking of play. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
12 pages, 433 KiB  
Article
Pain’s Echo: Lament and Revenge in Ovid’s “Procne and Philomela”
by Ilit Ferber
Humanities 2023, 12(5), 96; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12050096 - 15 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1503
Abstract
The article offers a reexamination of Ovid’s story of Philomela and Procne, with an emphasis on revenge and lament as two responses to acts of wrongdoing and loss. My analysis begins by exploring philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives, mainly from Nietzsche and Freud, which [...] Read more.
The article offers a reexamination of Ovid’s story of Philomela and Procne, with an emphasis on revenge and lament as two responses to acts of wrongdoing and loss. My analysis begins by exploring philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives, mainly from Nietzsche and Freud, which are usually thought of as complete opposites: revenge is considered active and violent, whereas lament is passive and paralyzed. However, upon revising Ovid’s tale of unimaginable suffering answered by both lament and revenge, I show that in Ovid’s story, they appear as interconnected and dependent on each other. Initially, Philomela appears as the passive, lamenting sister, while Procne appears as the angry, vengeful one. Nevertheless, as the narrative unfolds, the roles of the sisters change. Through the characters of Philomela and Procne, Ovid presents a compelling account in which these two responses can be seen as mirror images of the same phenomenon, rather than diametrically opposed binaries. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Literature, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis)
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