SPECIAL ISSUE: PSYCHOANALYSIS AND THE POLITICAL 
GUEST EDITOR: JAN MIESZKOWSKI

Jan Mieszkowskik, Analogy, Terminable and Interminable

Alan Bass, The Mystery of Sex and the Mystery of Time:
An Integration of Some Psychoanalytic and Philosophical
Perspectives

Brett Levinson, In Theory, Politics Does not Exist

Laurence A. Rickels, Endopsychic Allegories

Eleanor Kaufman, The Desire Called Mao: Badiou and the
Legacy of Libidinal Economy



Reviews
 
Joseph Keith, "What Went Wrong?: Reappraising the
"Politics" of Theory." A review of Timothy Brennan,
_Wars of Position: The Cultural Politics of Left and
Right_. New York: Columbia UP, 2006..

Joshua Kates, "Philopolemology." A review of Alain
Badiou, _Polemics_. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso,
2006.

Michael Malouf, "When Were We Creole?" A
review of Charles Stewart, ed. _Creolization: History,
Ethnography, Theory_. Walnut Creek: Left Coast, 2007.

Catherine Taylor, "Open Studios: Rachel Blau
Duplessis's Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work."
A review of _Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Blue Studios:
Poetry and Its Cultural Work_. Tuscaloosa: Alabama
UP, 2006.

Melinda Cooper, "Homeland Insecurities."
A review of Randy Martin, _An Empire of Indifference:
American War and the Financial Logic of Risk
Management_. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.

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                  Notes on Contributors


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                         Abstracts

Alan Bass, The Mystery of Sex and the Mystery of Time:
An Integration of Some Psychoanalytic and Philosophical
Perspectives

* Abstract: Freudian theory historicizes sexuality, makes
it temporal in a new way. Is there a relation between the
rethinking of time in Heidegger and the temporality of
sexuality? Jean Laplanche asks a similar question, and
attempts to answer it. The paper takes up Laplanche's
question, and provides a different answer, by focusing
on the work of contemporary analysts who have extended
the theory of sexuality into the realm of the transitional,
and on related conceptions from Derrida and Deleuze. A
stricter integration of Freud and Heidegger on sexuality
and time is proposed via a reading of Freud's obscure
notion of primary, intermediate organizations of the
drives. --ab

Brett Levinson, In Theory, Politics Does Not Exist

* Abstract:  This essay considers a line of thought about
the possibility of political action in psychoanalytic
theory. In the mid-1930s George Bataille asked why
popular political movements during this period yielded,
ultimately, fascism rather than communism. He responds by
suggesting that for the reverse to take place, the very
structure of knowledge needs to be reworked, and argues
that the Freudian unconscious represents a possible
commencement for that reworking. In "The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis," a seminar delivered during the Parisian
student movements, and one famous for introducing the "four
discourses" (of the master, the hysteric, the analyst, and
the university), Lacan examines in detail this thesis,
revealing how an analysis of the unconscious might help
reshape our thinking on popular movements, especially
insofar as that thinking is derived from Marx. The essay
concludes by investigating the recent fierce debate
between Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek about populism,
a dispute largely informed by psychoanalysis. --bls

Laurence A. Rickels, Endopsychic Allegories

* Abstract: Philip K. Dick's Valis trilogy staggers as
seemingly separable phases the elements he metabolized all
together in such works as Ubik and The Three Stigmata of
Palmer Eldritch. From the intersection crowded with science
fiction, schizophrenia, and mysticism in Valis (the novel)
we pass through the fantasy genre (in The Divine Invasion)
as the temptation that science fiction must repeatedly
overcome and end up inside the recent past of the scene of
 writing of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which we
traverse via modern Spiritualist attempts to keep in touch
with the departed. With the Valis trilogy's cross-sectioning
of the psy-fi condition as illustration and inspiration, the
essay revisits--as endopsychic allegory--the stations of
Freud's and Benjamin's crossing with or through Schreber,
and concludes with a reading of Dick's "first" science
fiction novel, Time Out of Joint, in which the author
deliberately seeks to engage or stage Schreber's
narrative. --lar

Eleanor Kaufman, The Desire Called Mao: Badiou and the
Legacy of Libidinal Economy

* Abstract: Although Alain Badiou's early work is deeply critical
of French theories of libidinal economy that sought to synthesize
Marx and Freud in the wake of May 1968, this essay seeks to
summarize the central tenets of libidinal economy theory--the
emphasis on the desire structure proper to use value; the
boundaries of the human explored through the death drive; a
thought of radical inertia--and argues that there is more
overlap than might be thought, especially concerning inertia.
Badiou's interest in Mao is considered in its connection to
problems of periodization, of counting a century, and the
thought of the party, and these link back to theories of
libidinal economy through a shared fascination with the
intemporal, if not the unconscious. --ek