<p>Cindy Zeiher has provided us here with an erudite collection of irreverent reflections on a topic of no small importance! In these pages, the reader will find Freud glowingly characterized as the world’s first Professor of Stupidity, and psychoanalysis as at times a foolosophical enterprise that takes human stupidity as its main object of study. Thought by some to be excessively cerebral, Lacan nevertheless invites us—analysands and analysts alike—to dwell and even revel in stupidity. In this collection, the contributors evince studied stupidity by allowing themselves to remain dupes of the unconscious.</p>
- Bruce Fink, Lacanian psychoanalyst, author of <i>A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique</i>,
<p>Lacan contends that the human animal as the "animal that supposes to know" remains structurally if not biologically afflicted by stupidity. In this broad sense, we are all not <i>sapiens </i>but <i>folie</i>-sophers. Famously, he also claims that the alleged non-stupid err the most. Dumb <i>or</i> dumber, it would seem. Is psychoanalysis then a question of fatalistically accepting this false choice and opt for ready-at-hand dumbness, trying not to know too much? Or is it instead a renewed Socratic method that turns such generic dumbness into wise ignorance, as a pacifying sublation achieved by the few who, erring the most, still somehow manage to know best? Problematising such clichéd alternative, in <i>Psychoanalysis and Stupidity</i>,<i></i>Cindy Zeiher sapiently brings together a wide-ranging and entertaining collection of pungent essays whose provisional endpoint might be: Dumb <i>and</i> dumber, dialectically, or both are worse!</p>
- Lorenzo Chiesa, Newcastle University and European Graduate School,
<p>A wonderful collection of essays that highlights the central role that stupidity has played in psychoanalytic theory and practice—from the nature and function of such psychoanalytic concepts as the signifier, the symptom, the death drive, and jouissance, to the psychoanalytic understanding of humor, knowledge, being, and sexuality. While reading the essays collected herein, one will marvel at just how stupid we have been not to have realized stupidity's significance for psychoanalysis sooner. A truly critical intervention.</p>
- Russell Sbriglia, Seton Hall University,
<p>Can stupidity be avoided? Should it be? Can and should psychoanalysis make the subject less stupid? In attempting to answer these questions the present volume is anything but <i>naïve </i>or indifferent. Rather contributors maintain that psychoanalysis renews stupidity within moral and political contemporary debates. Stupidity has a long record of being dismissed and overlooked especially since the function of western philosophy is born out of the desire to eradicate it. Here the mastery of the philosopher is to signify truth. However, this book very originally argues that stupidity is not mere intellectual disability.</p><p>In this collection internationally renowned psychoanalysts, philosophers, literary critics all put to work “the importance of being stupid” as not in praise of a position that can turn out to be tragic but rather as an acknowledgement of an experience constitutive of our very being— our <i>être parlant</i> which requires to be critically addressed.</p>
- Isabelle Alfandary, philosopher and psychoanalyst, Sorbonne Nouvelle University,
There is nothing new in thinking that we live in stupid times. Many past thinkers thought about stupidity as a symptom, however, Lacan considered stupidity as immune to the influence of psychoanalysis, saying about himself, “I am only relatively stupid―that is to say, I am as stupid as all people―perhaps because I got a little bit enlightened." Here it seems that stupidity signifies (and is signified by) the absence of any coherent foundation in desire and lack, but instead emanate from the will to jouissance. Here stupidity is inescapable whether it be individual, communal, or ideological.
In Stupidity and Psychoanalysis, chapters by internationally respected Lacanian analysts and theoreticians think about how we can understand stupidity as a specific psychoanalytic encounter. This collection draws critical Lacanian attention to considering new ways to approach stupidity and stupor as new contemporary subjective and social forms. Contributors provide various insights into how stupidity might be rethought as contemporary signifiers whose importance lies (for better or worse) more in producing effect than in transmitting meaning.
Contributors: Giole P. Cima, Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker, David Ferraro, Luis Izcovich, Adrian Johnston, James Martell, Jean-Michel Rabate, Samo Tomsic, Antonio Viselli, and Cindy Zeiher.
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Why We Should Listen to Stupidity’s Bad Reputation
Cindy Zeiher
Chapter 1. Stupid Jokes
Jean-Michel Rabaté
Chapter 2. Natural Born Dupes: A Lacanian Theory of Stupidity
Gioele P. Cima
Chapter 3. “For to Begin Yet Again”: Re-Rising the Ground(s) of Stupidity in Deleuze-Schelling-Lacan
James Martell
Chapter 4. Stupidity of the Signifier
Samo Tomšič
Chapter 5. Lacan and Pigeons
Antonio Viselli
Chapter 6. Errare Humanum Est… On Psychoanalysis as Morosophy
Dany Nobus
Chapter 7. Responses to the Sexual Void: Capitalism, Paranoia and Disavowal
David Ferraro
Chapter 8. A Mass of Fools and Knaves’: Psychoanalysis and the World’s Many Asininities
Adrian Johnston
Chapter 9. Can One be Less Stupid?
Luis Izcovich, Translated by Ed Pluth
Chapter 10. A Paradigmatic Case of Brazilian National Stupidity: Olavo de Carvalho
Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker
Chapter 11. Seriously! That is Fucking Stupid! The Importance of Being Stupid, Earnestly
Cindy Zeiher
Index
About the Contributors
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Cindy Zeiher is a Lacanian psychoanalyst in training, translator and senior lecturer at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury, where she teaches modernism and postmodernism in the human services program. Her work explores psychoanalytic interventions and interpretations relating to subjectivity, ontology, politics and creativity, especially music. Her poetry has been published and anthologised in Aotearoa/New Zealand and internationally.