Joan Copjec

The importation of Lacanian psychoanalysis into film theory in the 1970s and 1980s ushered in a new era of cinema scholarship and criticism. Figures including Raymond Bellour, Laura Mulvey, and Christian Metz are often considered the pioneers of applying Lacanian psychoanalysis in the context of film theory, most notably through their writings in Screen Journal. However, where French and British scholarship on Lacan and film reached its limits, American Lacanianism flourished. When Joan Copjec’s now classic essay “The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan” was published in 1989, the trajectory of Lacanian film theory would become radically altered; as Todd McGowan recently put it, the “butchered operation” on Lacan committed by Mulvey and (quoting Copjec) the “Foucaultianization” of Lacan under the auspices of Screen Journal were finally indicted in one gesture through Copjec’s critique. Copjec and McGowan’s unique American view of Lacan marks a pivotal point in the convergence of psychoanalytic theory and cinema studies; by seeking to wrest Lacan from historist/deconstructionist theories of the subject, and by revisiting Lacan beyond the mirror stage, Copjec and McGowan can be said to have instantiated a resuscitation or even a renaissance of Lacanian theory in film studies in particular and in American scholarship more generally. In this essay, this renaissance of Lacanian theory is examined, focusing on the innovations these two American thinkers brought to psychoanalytic film theory and the multiple paths carved out into other disciplines that followed. First, a detailed summation of the contentions between screen theory and Copjec’s position is introduced, as well as McGowan’s assessment thereof. Then, the trajectory of psychoanalytic film theory after Copjec’s arrival is the focus, including the major innovations in her thought from cinematic subjectivity to sexual difference (most notably from Read My Desire) and the way her position spread to philosophy, ontology, and even race theory. Finally, the article identifies the limitations of Copjec’s and McGowan’s thought and seeks new possibilities through which we may continue to apply psychoanalysis to the cinema in the wake of these two important thinkers.

This (unfinished) book aims to engage directly the issue of subjectivity, particularly as developed by Lacan in his revival of key Freudian ideas. The idea is to see subjectivity through the media of space and time. This involves an experiment to identify perspectival space as the “primary place” of subjectivity; and to consider how perspectivalism’s gaps and breakdowns might correspond to the gaps and breakdowns famously attributed to subjectivity’s “rational exterior.” For the benefit of non-Lacanian readers, it’s necessary to say that subjectivity is not a formal entity but, rather, an “ongoing project” that imposes severe and even impossible demands on the humans it would enlist (failure is built–in). Everyone who wants to participate in networks of symbolic relationships must join. “Discourse” is subjectivity’s sustaining communicative protocol. In contrast to the majority of communications models, however, Lacanian discourse emphasizes how our attempts to communicate end in failure — not just failure in general but specific kinds of failure, each with distinctive significant externalities. So, in comparing subjectivity to perspectivalism, the aim is to find where, in our predominantly “projective” perspectival notions of space and time, analogous breakdowns occur; and, when and where they occur, what they have to say about subjectivity’s limits, alternatives, and positive side–effects.

In Denis Villeneuve’s 2017 film Arrival, twelve alien pods land across the world. In focusing on the experience of linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) as she learns to decode the alien language, the film explores cinematic representations of death in a multitude ways. This paper considers the various ways in which death is signified in the film including the depiction of melancholia and warfare in mise-en-scène, trauma and sublimation in temporal structure, and the expression of language in the film’s unfolding narrative. By considering how other contemporary science-fiction genre films play with time in their narrative structure, this paper argues that Arrival’s linking of language, death and time is particularly sophisticated in how it weaves these three concepts in its overall construction.

This article uses psychoanalytical theory to recognise the ways in which Arrival communicates the interplay between the life/death cycle and language,  with particular reference to the work of Jacques Lacan, and the interpretation of Lacanian theory by Joan Copjec and Todd McGowan.

Abstract
Given the ongoing Spanish crisis brought about by zealous capitalistic speculation, this article examines the film Magical Girl (2014) by Carlos Vermut as an exploration of the properties of cultural production to serve as an antidote to the ‘magical’ properties of capitalism. Reading in Magical Girl a return to the theological concept of the sacred as proposed by Jean-Luc Nancy, it argues that this sacred is a secular one best seen through artistic production because of its ability to unveil the hidden workings
of the capitalist project.

Resumen
Tomando como contexto la crisis española, originada por el capitalismo especulativo financiero, este artículo examina la película Magical Girl (2014) de Carlos Vermut y explora el potencial de ciertas producciones culturales españolas como antídotos a las propiedades ‘mágicas’ del capitalismo. A través de una lectura de Magical Girl que la propone como un retorno al concepto teológico de lo sagrado, según lo define el
filósofo francés Jean-Luc Nancy, este artículo propone a la producción artística como espacio que mejor visibiliza lo sagrado debido a su habilidad para develar los mecanismos ocultos del proyecto capitalista.

’Read My QR: Quilla Constance and the Conceptualist Promise of Intelligibility’, in Nick Aikens, susan pui san lok and Sophie Orlando (eds.), Conceptualism - Intersectional Readings, International Framings: Situating 'Black Artists & Modernism' in Europe, Van AbbeMuseum, 2019, pp. 36-53. Open access epub: https://mediabank.vanabbemuseum.nl/vam/files/alexandria/publiciteit/e-pub/2019/vam_epub%20BAM_DEC19_V5_final3.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3oiqrzzzNBl5yvWIrltVjLG4kLiVcX-6z_iXUKLGw-jsXHQOb1VqsEvjQ

This chapter contributes to the on-going questioning of the definitions of conceptualism from feminist psychoanalytic perspectives and in reference specifically to the practice of British artist Quilla Constance, aka #QC, the post-punk, neo-glam, gender-questioning performance persona of Jennifer Allen. In #QC’s practice identity politics is not represented but produced, and its production is framed in an exploration of the boundaries between sense, nonsense and different kinds of sensibility and intelligibility, acknowledging the inflection of knowledge and its systems by the vicissitudes of power. I consider how the intelligibility of power, affect and desire is both entertained and resisted in #QC’s work and will begin to outline how #QC’s performative engagement with visual and material culture reveals a nuanced understanding of identity and (dis)identification and the role of art practice in mining them. Her video piece Pukijam (2015) scrutinises food as a signifying system onto which social class and ethnic identities are mapped out, from fried chicken in cardboard take-away boxes to tea in fine bone china cups. The live performance equivalent of this tension between opacity and semiotic plenitude can be found in #QC’s lectures, in which a rigorous engagement with critical theory devolves (or evolves) into inarticulate cries. Uncomfortably juxtaposed, #QC’s lecturing voice and her screams trace the boundaries of linguistic intelligibility and probingly reference conceptualism’s deployment of art as a reading instrument for visual culture.

La preocupación radica en comprender cómo el drama de Antígona puede releerse de manera ética a la luz de los planteamientos del psicoanálisis y una filosofía que parece colindar con los denominados “estudios culturales”. Las posturas que aborda el escrito –Joan Copjec y Judith Butler– parecen ir en contravía a partir de las nociones de cuerpo, vida y el Otro. Si el hilo conductor de la argumentación está centrado en la ética, habrá que sopesar la manera en que el psicoanálisis concibe el cuerpo en tanto ser sexuado y, así mismo, problematizar la ontología del sujeto que privilegia su relación en tanto cuerpo sexuado y no en una relacionalidad ética con el otro. Confrontadas ambas posiciones, el interés estará en señalar la manera como Butler rescata la vida a partir de la precariedad que compartimos como sujetos fuera de control, expuestos permanentemente al daño –como se piensa la desposesión fundamental, la irrupción de la identidad, pues el sujeto se ve atravesado por la intrusión primaria del Otro, que lo constituye y determina su horizonte ético-político. 
El posible camino que me llevará entre el contraste de ambas relecturas de la tragedia de Antígona será el de una escena ética donde Antígona, a través de la proclama de su amor, inmortalizará su herencia familiar y dejará consignada una responsabilidad irrecusable con su hermano. La escena, por tanto, estará atravesada por una primacía de la ética y de la relación con el otro: herencia que reveláremos a través de una lectura butleriana de la propuesta ética levinasiana.

Transcript of paper presented at Film-Philosophy Conference, University of Brighton, 9-11 July 2019.

Abstract:
HBO’s mini-series Sharp Objects (2018) created by Marti Noxon, follows journalist Camille Preaker (Amy Adams) as she returns to her family home in Wind Gap, Missouri to report on the recent murders of young girls that have taken place in the town. Whilst there, traumatic events that occurred during Camille’s adolescence and early adult life are remembered through flashbacks, and the mysteries of the murders and Camille’s life unfold simultaneously.

Throughout the series, trauma is remembered and described through the inscription of words. Camille’s occupation as a journalist directs the narrative through her struggle to write articles concerning the Wind Gap murders. In tandem with this narrative focus, each episode’s title corresponds to a word Camille has previously cut into her body in an act of self-harm. As Camille literally embodies the linguistic sign, the show is able to frame her body as a textual template for the visual and philosophical areas of show.

Words are often visually and aurally echoed in both narrative structuring and mise-en-scene: the cut of flesh and editorial cut, the paternal role of Camille’s professional editor and the striking way the show is edited, and the ecstasy pill taken by Amma as literalising the ecstasy of a re-enactment of an American fantasy provide examples of this technique. Such play with language encourages both metaphor and metonymic chains to create and deconstruct desire and meaning through the complex economy of the word.

El presente trabajo de investigación se adscribe a una línea teórica crítica del historicismo posmoderno, representado en este caso particular por la denominada Teoría Queer, la cual desde la amplitud de voces coincide en identificar al cuerpo como un topos de producción de la subjetividad. En este sentido, el cuerpo queer es representado como una materia inerte que obtiene su forma a partir de la interacción del mismo con los múltiples dispositivos de poder que graban en la superficie del cuerpo los rasgos de la subjetividad. Por este motivo, la línea teórica crítica de esta singular perspectiva sobre la corporalidad se va a identificar como Escuela de Liubliana, donde los principales exponentes de la misma (Žižek, Copjec y Zupančič), van a confrontar dicha propuesta desde la concepción de la diferencia sexual como una diferencia estructurante de las otras diferencias, inscribiéndola en lo Real lacaniano. En este sentido se pensará a la corporalidad como un cuerpo sexuado, y por ende, la diferencia sexual será comprendida como la diferencia primera y ontológica que a todo sujeto le impide tener un acceso absoluto al orden simbólico, lo que habilitará a pensar en la noción de resto como punto inasimilable por el historicismo posmoderno. Las nociones acerca de la corporalidad en el historicismo posmoderno se caracterizan por identificar el orden simbólico con la subjetividad, propiciando una lectura de los procesos de subjetivación como formas de inscripción de marcas de género, raza y clase, obviando la posibilidad de pensar dichas inscripciones en un marco jerarquización de las diferencias. El cuerpo que presenta el historicismo posmoderno tiene como mayor exponente a la concepción filosófica de Preciado, quien concibe al cuerpo como una somateca, es decir, como tópos donde se produce la subjetividad. Esta noción de corporalidad defiende una postura foucaultiana que ve al cuerpo como un texto, con la posibilidad de dos movimientos, el de escritura y el re-escritura. Por un lado el proceso de escritura es el de inscripción de los diversos rasgos del orden simbólico en la corporalidad, instituyendo una determinada subjetividad dependiendo de las instituciones y prácticas que lleven a cabo dicho marcaje. El proceso de re-escritura se constituye como proceso de

Daniel Adleman's chapter explores J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace as an imaginative rearticulation of Sophocles's Antigone. According to Adleman's reading, David Lurie's conservative utopian fantasy of a place (topos), or occupational sphere, insulated against all potential onslaughts is situated situated at violent cross-currents with its raced, gendered, classed, and even speciesed blindspots. Adleman posits that Coetzee’s novel figures a countervailing thanatopian mode of dissidence that reverberates through the Occupy and Idle No More movements. This seemingly futile thanatopian striving, Adleman argues, orients itself away from the neoliberal extraction of value and circulation of goods toward the generation of new values and ceaseless reconstitution of “the Good.”

This dissertation examines different instances of resistance to dominant socio-cultural
regimes through new media. In order to showcase this, I focused on three case studies: the first one was the work of Amalia Ulman, a new media artist who uses selfies in order critically engage with the representations of femininity on Instagram. Ulman’s work was then linked to the feminist bibliography around what Amelia Jones defined as ‘radical narcissism’. Following that, I engage with a discussion of Grindr, a popular gay dating application. I was particularly interested in how Grindr disrupts heteronormative constructions of the public sphere. Finally, I discuss Pokémon GO, a location-based smartphone application that gained the attention of the public in 2016. Pokémon GO, similarly to Grindr, disrupts normative understandings of space by introducing an augmented reality narrative in physical locations. I expand on this idea by developing my own location-based application that inserted poems rather than Pokémon, in different places within the city. My analytical framework is informed by Lacanian psychoanalysis, with a particular focus on understanding selfhood in the context of the emergence and normalisation of new media technologies. By understanding selfhood as an inherently psycho-social construction I was able to identify the political significance of subjectivity and its relation to technological advancements.

This article identifies how scholars have displaced antagonism within histories of Sikhism and South Asian Studies more broadly. In contrast to this displacement, this article foregrounds antagonism by taking into account a third element within the presumed colonizer and colonized relationship: a curved space of nonrelation that signals there can be no colonial relationship. By considering the constitutive nature of antagonism within social reality that remains unable to be demarcated, this article examines the generative principles of Sikh practices and concepts that both structure Sikhism's institutions and productively conceptualize this antagonism. Examining these concepts and practices, I consider the possibility of different modes of both historical being and becoming not bound within our current conceptual rubrics. These different possibilities culled through Sikh concepts and theories demand we reflect upon the rabble: those unable to be contained within colonial civil society or within attempts by the colonized for self‐determination in political societies. This void then fractured Sikh reform organizations historically, providing multiple avenues for politics unaccountable within our bifurcated and asymmetrical understandings of civil society and political societies and colonizer and colonized.

En esta comunicación se toma el texto de Derrida « Ser justo con Freud. La historia de la locura en la edad del psicoanálisis» como punto de partida, en el que el mismo Derrida advierte, desde el principio, lo lejos que está de abrir de nuevo la discusión con Foucault que tuvo lugar los años posteriores a la publicación del libro "Historia de la locura en la época clásica", en 1961. El objetivo es presentar una serie de cuestiones que se exponen muy esquemáticamente en la conferencia de Derrida y que surgen de la lectura que hace Foucault de Freud particularmente en "Historia de la locura...", donde éste ocupa un lugar paradójico y doble. A partir de la figura del Genio Maligno, Derrida expone las formulaciones opuestas de Foucault sobre la proximidad y distancia que existe entre el psicoanálisis y la locura, entre Freud y nosotros, que Derrida describe como una bisagra, como el fort/da de un péndulo. La prueba, por tanto, de estas aporías serían la oportunidad de pensar una serie de cuestiones que afectan al estatuto de la locura y la finitud en la obra de Foucault, Derrida pero también de Freud.

This article takes us into the heart of the complexities of the concept of narcissism, which has been deployed by psychoanalysts, film theorists and cultural critics to various and often contradictory ends. I begin by considering the use of narcissism as a diagnostic category used to examine the ills of modern society, especially in the work of writers like Christopher Lasch. This discussions leads me to the theorisation of narcissism in the work of Sigmund Freud, and I suggest that the concept is much more contradictory and complex in Freud's work, which makes its usage an act of interpretation—an interpretation, I will suggest, with crucial consequences for how we conceptualise the modern subject's relationship to new media technologies, as well as the politics of representation. The Lacanian concept of the 'mirror phase' is an important intervention in the theorisation of narcissism and is discussed in this chapter in order to understand the smartphone screen as a field of representation and identification. By extending the problematic of the mirror to the screen, and by taking into account Joan Copjec's critique of psychoanalytic readings of the cinematic screen, we will examine the specificities of the mobile screen in relation to ego formation. This account makes a break with Foucauldian theories of the subject, and I offer a psychoanalytic critique of panopticist theories of subjectivity, which I suggest, lead to an impasse in how we think about the screen—whether in the cinema or as the surface of a modern day mobile phone.

Cet article examine les liens entre, pour l’aspect technique, le plan séquence et le montage, et, pour l’aspect philosophico-historique, la vie quotidienne et la politique mondiale, du point de vue d’une profanation capable de désamorcer la puissance et avec une attention particulière portée à l’unique film expérimental de Pasolini : La sequenza del fiore di (1968). Ce court métrage n’a pas seulement un statut spécial dans la filmographie de Pasolini, il marque aussi un tournant du tragique vers un ton comique/pessimiste de son cinéma profanateur. Cet article révèle aussi une réception inattendue de Heidegger, par l’intermédiaire du marxisme heideggerien de Karel Kosik et d’une conception benjaminienne du profane fondée sur l’idée de bonheur.

Resumen En este trabajo consideramos el posthumanismo como un horizonte conceptual desde el que describir el mundo de relaciones en el que habita lo humano cuando su carácter de “medida de todas las cosas” ha sido puesto en cuestión; pero también como una característica del capitalismo contemporáneo, entendido éste no sólo como una forma de organización de los modos de producción económica sino también como un modo de producción de subjetividad y de un tipo de vínculo social. Tiene como objetivo presentar ...