The goal of this paper is to provide a "transcendental critical" interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis through an examination of the historical circumstances surrounding the development of Lacan's ideas and their underlying philosophical basis. Rather than operating as a closed system, I argue that Lacanian thought functions on the basis of "parallax" between irreconcilable positions (e.g., Kleinian vs. Anna-Freudian psychoanalysis, structuralism vs. poststructuralism) stemming from a central antinomy. To that end, Lacan ought to be understood above all as a critic, in the same vein as Kant and Marx.  [Article]

To best understand the ways in which the Compson siblings of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury interact with each other and with their changing surroundings, one must view their actions and judgments through a rhetorical lens focused on the Aristotelian modes of pathos, ethos, and logos in the context of the forces of eros and thanatos. The setting of the “broken” antebellum South provides a backdrop of tension behind the story of the equally broken, and breaking, Compson family. Each brother employs a different rhetorical mode — Benjy pathos, Jason logos, and Quentin ethos — to comprehend their relationship with their sister Caddy, the eros and thanatos of them all. Within the workings of the novel, Caddy herself is less a person than she is a strong symbol of the erotic and thanatotic forces present in human nature. She metamorphoses between representing eros and representing thanatos throughout each brother’s piece; eventually the two forces become interchangeable as her erotic vitality accelerates her family’s thanatotic downward spiral. Benjy’s plaintive displays of love, anger, pity, and fear; Jason’s logotic hypocrisy and selfrighteous sense of injury at his loss of the Old South; and finally Quentin’s sense of self so unrelenting that the pressure he feels from distinguishing right from wrong leads him to end his life—each demonstrate that the eros and thanatos Caddy symbolizes govern every decision her brothers make. Without the completeness of multiple modes of thinking and existence at their disposal, none of the brothers ever reach Faulkner’s ironic suggestion of “each in its ordered place.” Instead they remain perpetually trapped in their fugue-like mindsets, without the relief of another mode to render them whole and set them free.  [Article]

In the period between the end of the Thirty Years War and the beginning of the French Revolution, Western culture experienced a remarkable transformation in perceptions and understandings of religion among the educated classes. One century after the end of the bloodiest war in European history, the cultural landscape allowed for Julien Offray de La Mettrie to expound his extreme materialism and the Baron d'Holbach to flatly deny the existence of a deity without fear of execution for heresy, and indeed with the support of powerful figures. This shift in religious thought is part of a larger transformative process in the West during the post-Reformation and Enlightenment eras which supported the development of modern Western culture. The effacement of religious hegemony over Western societies allowed for rival sources of values and truth, such as nationalism, the natural sciences, or economics, to emerge. I consider this shift in religious thought by focusing on one period in its development, namely, the early English Enlightenment. Falling between early Enlightenment thought produced in the Dutch Republic and the later 'High' Enlightenment focusing largely on French figures and works, the English Enlightenment is important as a transitional period. In choosing to focus on this period, I examine the processes of development behind a larger shift in religious thought occurring in early modern Western Europe. I focus upon several authors, whose works exhibit trends in thought that are shared both with earlier works by figures like Spinoza and Balthazar Bekker and later works produced during the French Enlightenment. These trends show how theories inherited from earlier works were further developed during this period, becoming increasingly more radical and moving farther away from traditional religious thought. I conclude with a close examination of John Toland, in the interest of showing how several common themes in radical religious thought combine in a single, cohesive philosophy.  [Article]