Is there a Lacanian clinic? Undoubtedly. It is based on fidelity to the Freudian psychoanalytic method, a fidelity that, paradoxically, demands innovation. If Freudian psychoanalysis is a method of research and treatment of the psyche, it continues to be so in Lacan, although transformed. The psychoanalytic clinic employs the “talking cure,” and Lacan, like no one else, revolutionized the relationship between language and psychoanalysis. Free association is still the thread running through psychoanalytic practice, enriched thanks to a subverted linguistics. Its rationality is formalized and determined by the rule of free association, a process in which chance is rigorously harnessed. This program results in a freedom from any a priori determinism, whether biological or sociological, which would undermine the very exercise of psychoanalysis. The psyche to be cured is regarded as a subject-effect caused by the interplay of signifiers in the unconscious, a process that dissolves its supposed ego-like solidity, and, in a word, de-substantializes it. Therefore, the Lacanian clinic requires a complex conceptual battery, which may be discouraging for those who expect comfortable technical recipes. If there is one thing the apprentice psychoanalyst will not find, it is a recipe. Not only because a recipe would not be appropriate to the specificity of each unconscious, but because the unconscious and the subject it generates are deeply marked by the historicity which affects the exercise of psychoanalysis in each period, and which retroactively affects the unconscious itself.

In the works of Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani, Italy has made a lasting contribution to Holocaust literature. This is a mode of writing that has few of the characteristic features of a literary genre. A term that came into use in the 1960s, Holocaust literature includes a wide and varied range of texts, from the diaries of the victims of the Holocaust, to the memoirs of the survivors, to the fiction of writers who have taken the Holocaust as the subject of their works. The characteristic feature of Holocaust literature is the commitment to preserve the memory of the offense and the memory of the victims. Those who survived the atrocity and took up their pens to bear witness are generally recognized as the great Holocaust writers. These include Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Tadeusz Borowski, and Primo Levi. Of all these Holocaust writers, the Italian Jewish writer Primo Levi occupies a special place. Imprisoned in Auschwitz for eighteen months, from the summer of 1943 until the end of the war, Levi was one of the very few Italian survivors of the concentration camp. His first book, written only two months after his return from the concentration camp – Se questo è un uomo – is widely recognized as one of the most lucid and dispassionate accounts of the lager, the German term for the death camps.

Lacan died before queer theory came into existence, though he surely would have engaged this new discourse - as he engaged so many others - had he lived to know about it. His psychoanalytic critique of ego psychology and of adaptation to social norms shares much in common with queer theory's political critique of social processes of normalization. Indeed, while queer theory traces its intellectual genealogy to Michel Foucault, it can be argued that queer theory actually begins with Freud, specifically, with his theories of polymorphous perversity, infantile sexuality, and the unconscious. Lacan's “return to Freud” involves rediscovering all that is most strange and refractory - all that remains foreign to our normal, commonsensical ways of thinking - about human subjectivity. Thus from an Anglo-American perspective, Lacan makes psychoanalysis look rather queer. By virtue of its flouting norms of all kinds (including norms of intelligibility), Lacanian psychoanalysis may provide handy ammunition for queer theory's critique of what has come to be known as heteronormativity.

The term “heteronormativity” designates all those ways in which the world makes sense from a heterosexual point of view. It assumes that a complementary relation between the sexes is both a natural arrangement (the way things are) and a cultural ideal (the way things should be). Queer theory analyses how heteronormativity structures the meaningfulness of the social world, thereby enforcing a hierarchy between the normal and the deviant or queer. In its understanding of how the categories of normal and pathological emerge in a mutually constitutive relation, queer theory draws on Foucault’s revisionary account of modern power and, more specifically, on Georges Canguilhem’s critical histories of nosology.

Jouissance, the opposite pole of desire

On 5 March 1958, the theory, the technique, and the history of psychoanalysis were substantially changed. This change came about almost unnoticed by anyone, perhaps even unnoticed by Lacan himself, who could not have predicted where the path he had undertaken would lead. On that day, the teacher told his students that he wanted to show them what was meant by “. . . a notion . . . that has always been implied in our reflections on desire but that deserves to be distinguished from it, and which can only be articulated after one is sufficiently imbued in the complexity that constitutes desire. It is a notion that will be the other pole of today's discourse and it has a name: it is jouissance.” He ended this lecture by referring to “the essential question of desire and jouissance of which I gave you, today, a first gram.” When editing that fourteenth session of the seminar, The Formations of the Unconscious, Jacques-Alain Miller justifiably gave it the title Desire and Jouissance.

The following twenty years of Lacan’s teaching (who would have guessed the kilo that followed that first gram?) revolved around this opposition. Until then, the word jouissance had appeared in the Lacanian vocabulary simply as a word whose meaning – the conventional one – required no further explanation. Yet from that day on it became a term rich in nuances, a term that would get progressively more complicated, multiplying and defining itself until it was transformed into the foundation of a new psychoanalysis: a “notion” without which all else becomes inconsistent.

At the beginning of Book Gamma of his Metaphysics, Aristotle announces the existence of a peculiar branch of knowledge:

The science which considers everything which exists, insofar as it exists, Aristotle calls first philosophy. It is usually named metaphysics.

INTRODUCTION

The task of Christian theological anthropology is to depict evangelical (that is, Gospel-constituted) humanism. It aims to display the vision of human identity and flourishing which is ingredient within the Gospel's announcement that, in the being, action, and speech of Jesus Christ, the crucified who is now alive and present in the Spirit's power, the good purposes of God the Father for his human creation are established and their completion is promised. Christian theological anthropology offers a portrayal of the nature and destiny of humankind by explicating the Gospel's disclosure of the works and ways of the triune God.

Such claims, for all their loveliness, are culturally marginal. They are largely ignored, and occasionally repudiated, outside the sphere of the Christian confession; where they still retain profile, it is often only in crude versions. Because a Gospel-directed account of the human can thus claim almost no public self-evidence, the portrayal of an evangelical humanism of necessity involves Christian theological anthropology in a dispute about what constitutes “the humane.” This chapter addresses one particular focus of the dispute: the relation of Christian theological anthropology to deconstructive postmodernism.

Resistance to theory

The Italian literary establishment has always had a difficult relationship with the novel, and even more with the theory of the novel. “They do not have any novels as their English and French counterparts do”: so wrote Mme de Stäel, in her essay De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales (On Literature Considered in its Relationship with Social Institutions, 1800). For this reason when de Stäel published “Sulla maniera e l'utilit à delle traduzioni” (“On the Manner and Usefulness of Translations,” 1816) in the Biblioteca italiana, she invited Italians to read foreign writers, especially English and German ones, advice that caused irate reactions in the tiny Italian literary world. In defending Italian literary tradition, some Italians argued that the absence of novels was a reason for pride, not embarrassment, as Mme de Stäel suggested.

During the eighteenth century, in fact, the novel was commonly blamed in Italy for committing three unforgivable sins. Morally, novels contained sentimental stories that might corrupt a public of readers made up of idle people, mainly women. Aesthetically, the novel was considered an inferior genre, since it was unknown to the golden centuries of Italian literature and did not enjoy the same dignity, conferred by rigorously codified forms, as epic or tragedy. Linguistically, the novel rejected the selected vocabulary of the Petrarchan tradition and opened the doors of literature to coarse subjects and language; moreover, as it was thought to be of foreign origin, it favored the corruption of the Italian language, particularly by the French language. During the eighteenth century in Italy the genre of the novel had been left to a few professional writers, to a public of low or middle-low social extraction, and to women: these three groups were treated by literary society with supreme contempt.

Freud's work has been both praised and maligned for its frequent introduction of myths and narratives which attempt to map out the archaeology of the human psyche. These range from classical myth to the invention of new myths, from the use of the Sophoclean Oedipus to the strange story about the origin of society set out in Totem and Taboo. Critics of Freud have pointed out the limitations of these models, their historical contingency, and the implausibility of their claims in terms of evidence taken from other fields in the human sciences. As historical narratives, their weaknesses are taken as impeachments of Freudian theory as a whole. Hence the psychological theories of the Oedipus complex or the castration complex become, in their turn, mere myths, fictions that collapse once their historical underpinnings undergo scrutiny.

Even to those sympathetic to psychoanalysis, many of Freud’s narratives seem quaint and far-fetched, and yet, as the recently published text on the importance of the ice age for human development makes clear, such apparent flights of fancy formed an integral part of Freud’s procedure. A search for origins was characteristic of much early twentieth century thought, as it had been in the Enlightenment, and Freud’s commitment to a form of phylogeny was shared by many other Continental thinkers. While this is not the place to go into the details of Freud’s use of classical myth and mythic constructions, we can ask whether Lacan’s methods of exposition have anything in common with Freud’s.

Aiming to be neither “postmodern” nor “premodern” nor indeed “modern,” the “postmetaphysical” theology associated with French thinker Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) responds to a Christian God and Father who, as absolute love or charity, and according to that charity’s “essential anachronism,” would remain beyond all historical or cultural determination even while abandoning himself fully to history in the Christ. From such a perspective, Marion’s theology seeks to free the self-revelation of the Christian God from every precondition or determination of human thought and language – and above all from the thought and language of “Being” that have dominated Western metaphysics and its “ontotheological” conception of God as a “supreme being.”

In his critique of metaphysics as “ontotheology,” Marion is indebted primarily to Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), and in an eventual critique of Heidegger himself, Marion will draw on the post-Heideggerian thought of Emmanuel Levinas (1905–1995), but Marion’s core theological vision is shaped most decisively by the “divine-names” theology and “mystical” theology found in the late fifth- or early sixth-century writings of Dionysius the Areopagite (or the “Pseudo-Dionysius”). In the Dionysian appeal to an inconceivable and ineffable “Good beyond Being,” Marion locates an extrametaphysical “God without Being.” The “without” in this theology of “God without Being” does not mean to indicate that God is not or does not exist, but rather that any divine existence or nonexistence that human thought might ever imagine falls infinitely short of the divine generosity that stands at the heart of revelation. The highest name for God, Marion insists, is not to be found in the metaphysical predication of Being or essence but rather in the theological praise of goodness or love, for while finite creatures must first be in order to love, God loves “before Being,” and through that love alone God’s goodness gives all – including the Being of beings itself.

Even with all their diversity, feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologies have one thing in common: they make the liberation of women central to the theological task. This is not to say that there is complete consensus concerning the ends of such liberation. For example, feminists who argue that the flourishing of women is achieved by resistance to sexism are criticized by those who claim that such patterns unduly privilege the category of gender. Despite these conflicts, however, feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologians have historically shared a general liberation hermeneutic, marked, at least in part, by commitments around identity. Rather than positioning themselves as generic “theology,” these works emerged out of situations of oppression for marginalized groups that initiated critical assessments of existing social, ecclesial, and theological structures. The result has been liberative interpretive practices crafted from new combinations of the tradition and contemporary resources.

Postmodernism enters this theological discourse by providing resources designed to advance such liberative ends. The primary litmus for any postmodernism will be its contribution to analyses of the complexities of gender, race, sexual, and class oppressions. What is “post” about such resources is their refusal of some of the “modern” habits in theology, but only those that inhibit exploration of these conditions of oppression.

Realism or verismo? Basic assumptions and related problems

In late 1894 Giovanni Verga and Emile Zola (1840-1902), who had first met in Paris some twelve years earlier, were guests in Rome of Luigi Capuana. Capuana and Zola discussed literary theory to the veiled annoyance of Verga. When Zola ventured the opinion that Italian verismo and French naturalism were the same thing, Verga exclaimed: “Verismo, verismo . . . I prefer to call it the truth.” Many literary historians, having spent much time and ingenuity in discriminating between the two terms, would dispute Zola's opinion. Zola, Capuana, Verga, and other European nineteenth-century novelists, together with playwrights, poets, and visual artists outside the scope of this work, consciously followed a number of conventions and methodologies loosely called “realism,” whose various subcategories, however defined, all assume the artist's intention of modeling the artwork on life as it actually is.

This assumption raises intractable problems. Even if one was willing to take intentions into account, they tend to be undeclared, or obscured by lack of evidence. They may sometimes be reconstructed from the author’s work, but to use the work as evidence of the author’s alleged intentions in order to take them as material for its evaluation is a vicious circle. Declared intentions are often unrealized or largely at variance with the actual texts – and Verga’s, as we shall see, represent a case in point. Second, how does one model literature on life?

Theological methodology is like one of those cases where a foreign plant is imported to provide ground cover and ends up being a persistent weed that cannot be eradicated. The more it is attacked, chopped, and hacked, the more it grows. Once, it was seen as a desirable plant, the flower of theological development. It grew because it was cultivated and highly desired. As it has grown more disputed and even out of favor, it keeps coming back and is as profuse as ever. Why is the theological garden, so to speak, in such straits?

At the fading of modernity, it has become clear in theology that methodology, or, as it is often technically called, prolegomena, was central to its assumptions. As many have pointed out, modernity generally relied on a secure foundation and then a secure method to build on to the foundation – at least that was the goal. Postmodernism is the result of repeated failure to achieve such a lofty ideal; thus the postmodern turn especially rejects such reliance on foundationalism and method. The criticism of relying on method, however, has led to the proliferation of writings on proper methodology! The result is someone like William Placher writing an excellent book, entitled Unapologetic Theology, on theological methodology that eschews emphasis on methodology. He reflects in the Preface, “A good many people – myself included – have urged contemporary theologians to abandon their preoccupation with methodology and get on with the business of really doing theology. I therefore confess embarrassment at being the author of a sort of extended preface to contemporary discussions about theological method. Prologomena [sic] to prologomena [sic]! Worse and worse!”

Origins, models, themes, language, and politics of neorealism

Neorealism as an object of study has turned out to be a puzzling problem of literary history. Elio Vittorini – an important neorealist novelist, editor of the interdisciplinary journal Il Politecnico (1945-7) that championed neorealism, and editor of “I Gettoni,” a series devoted to young writers published by Einaudi from 1951 to 1958 – maintained that each neorealist writer had his or her own neorealism. Pier Paolo Pasolini thought that what neorealists had in common was basically just a “taste” for the real. Some critics point to Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929) by Alberto Moravia, to Luce fredda (Cold Light, 1933) by Umberto Barbaro (1902-59), and to Tre operai (Three Workers, 1934) by Carlo Bernari (1909-92) as examples of early neorealist novels, but other critics cite Cesare Pavese's Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters, 1941) as the only proto-neorealist text before World War II. The term neorealismo was used occasionally in Italy in the 1930s to refer to new forms of realism (for example, the German Neue Sachlichkeit) then emerging in Europe in opposition to nonrealist movements such as expressionism, futurism, and symbolism. In Italy, modernist forms of realism flourished in the 1930s, ranging from the “magic realism” of Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) to the experimental fictions, tinged with surrealism, of Paola Masino (1908–89), to the existential novels of Moravia and Barbaro. Novels such as Maria Zef (Maria Zef, 1936) by Paola Drigo (1876–1938) testify to the enduring legacy of verismo and foreshadow the neorealist interest in the economic underdevelopment of many regions of Italy, particularly the South or the Mezzogiorno.

Introduction

It has been claimed, with some justification, that the 'legacy of Greece to Western philosophy is Western philosophy'. The Greeks, after all, not only defined the main areas of philosophical inquiry – metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics and so on – but also formulated the questions which that inquiry has always sought to answer. Yet it was in the period from the twelfth to the seventeenth century that Greek thinkers, together with their Roman interpreters and followers, exerted the most profound influence on later philosophy. During this long epoch, extending from the late Middle Ages through the Renaissance and into the start of the early modern era, everything which survives today of ancient philosophy, with the exception of a few works, was recovered after the losses incurred in the aftermath of the Roman empire's collapse. Moreover, continuing the work of the Church Fathers, vigorous efforts were made, at different times and with varying degrees of success, to bring the major schools of pagan philosophy into line with Christianity. Once restored and reconciled with Christian theology, ancient philosophical traditions supplied the framework within which the philosophers operated and the foundation on which they built their own systems.

Discussing the interrelationships between film and literature, Italo Calvino once wrote: “There remains the fact that the cinema is continually being drawn toward literature. In spite of having such power of its own, the cinema has always been afflicted by jealousy of the written text: it wants to 'write'.” There are strands to the respective histories of the twentieth-century Italian novel and the Italian cinema that at times come together to form a kind of Gordian knot, so to speak, so tightly harnessed are they. At such times as these historical strands cross over, literature and cinema can be said to enter into a form of dialogue with one another. This dialogue between the Italian cinema and literature is amongst the most complex, fluid, and multifaceted to be found in any culture. To appreciate its full scope one has to acknowledge it at a number of interrelated levels. First, there is the most immediate and most commonly discussed question of adapting Italian novels to film form.

Works by Lacan

A detailed chronological list of Lacan's publications and Seminars (with their transcriptions) is available in Elisabeth Roudinesco's Lacan, pp. 511-34. Since the focus of this Companion is on English translations, the texts quoted here are available in English. I quote all the titles of the Seminars (one can find a useful summary of Lacan's works in Marcelle Marini, Jacques Lacan: The French Contexts, trans. Anne Tomiche (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 139-249. There is an unpublished and unauthorized English translation of all the Seminars by Cormac Gallagher. The dates given in parentheses in the first section are those of the original publications or, in the case of the Seminars, of the date on which they were held. I do not list the texts that are available in Ecrits: A Selection.

Geography played a crucial role in defining the Italian experience of “modernity.” Italy's official modernist movement, futurism, was the offspring of the northern urban centers of Milan, Turin, and Genoa, cities in which the con- flict between modernization and cultural tradition was the most severe, while the Italian modernists discussed here all approached the complex question of modern subjectivity from standpoints conditioned to a significant degree by their own regional origins. The culture of Pirandello's preindustrialized Sicily, remotely distant from the modern industrial province of Svevo's Trieste, accentuated the playwright's terror of life falling apart in a world of paradox and contradiction, a fear that Svevo had under control, and Gadda, armed with the weapons of a scientific culture, sought to overcome in parody and satire. However, in Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the “modernity” these writers faced each in his own unique way was one with the industrialization of production, the acceleration of the tempo of life due to developments in science and technology, and the emergence of new forms of class struggle. The ambiguity, anguish, and spiritual fluctuation, deriving from the breakdown of old hierarchies and the expansion of the capitalist market, were the general life-symptoms of a collective Western humanity, which the literary art of these authors at once incorporated and attempted to treat.