Stupidity and Psychoanalysis

Edited by Cindy Zeiher

Written by internationally recognised and respected Lacanian analysts and theoreticians, this collection thinks about how we can understand stupidity as a specific psychoanalytic encounter.

There is nothing new in thinking that we live in stupid times. Many past thinkers have expressed similar thoughts. Yet Lacan considered stupidity as immune to the influence of psychoanalysis; that stupidity signifies (and is signified by) the absence of any coherent foundation in desire and lack and instead emanate from the will to jouissance. Here stupidity is inescapable whether it be individual, communal or ideological.

This collection draws critical Lacanian attention to the work of Ronnell, Žižek, Kant, Rancière, Hegel and Derrida as well as consider new ways to approach stupidity and stupor as new contemporary subjective and social forms. To interrogate stupidity provides a way of interrogating our position in relation to the Other. It reveals the social, even political, investment in stupidity, which we might not readily care to admit to. Stupidity might even have the important function of enabling us to reflect differently on the banal or frustrating circumstances which sometimes engulf us.

This collection offers various insights into how stupidity and stupor might be rethought as contemporary signifiers whose importance lies (for better or worse) more in producing effect than in transmitting meaning.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

•

978-1-78661-620-3 • Hardback • May 2023 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-78661-621-0 • eBook • May 2023 • $38.00 • (£29.00) (coming soon)

Subjects: Philosophy / Social, Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis, Philosophy / Continental Philosophy

Stupidity and Psychoanalysis

Hardback

Summary

Written by internationally recognised and respected Lacanian analysts and theoreticians, this collection thinks about how we can understand stupidity as a specific psychoanalytic encounter.

There is nothing new in thinking that we live in stupid times. Many past thinkers have expressed similar thoughts. Yet Lacan considered stupidity as immune to the influence of psychoanalysis; that stupidity signifies (and is signified by) the absence of any coherent foundation in desire and lack and instead emanate from the will to jouissance. Here stupidity is inescapable whether it be individual, communal or ideological.

This collection draws critical Lacanian attention to the work of Ronnell, Žižek, Kant, Rancière, Hegel and Derrida as well as consider new ways to approach stupidity and stupor as new contemporary subjective and social forms. To interrogate stupidity provides a way of interrogating our position in relation to the Other. It reveals the social, even political, investment in stupidity, which we might not readily care to admit to. Stupidity might even have the important function of enabling us to reflect differently on the banal or frustrating circumstances which sometimes engulf us.

This collection offers various insights into how stupidity and stupor might be rethought as contemporary signifiers whose importance lies (for better or worse) more in producing effect than in transmitting meaning.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

•

978-1-78661-620-3 • Hardback • May 2023 • $120.00 • (£92.00)

978-1-78661-621-0 • eBook • May 2023 • $38.00 • (£29.00) (coming soon)

Subjects: Philosophy / Social, Psychology / Movements / Psychoanalysis, Philosophy / Continental Philosophy

Table of Contents

Introduction to Collection: The Importance of Being Earnestly Stupid
Cindy Zeiher

Natural Born Dupes: a Lacanian Theory of Stupidity
Gioele P. Cima

Stupidity of the Signifier
Samo Tomsic

Responses to the Sexual Void: Capitalism, Paranoia and Disavowal
David Ferraro

A Mass of Fools and Knaves’: Psychoanalysis and the World’s Many Asininities
Adrian Johnston

Can One be Less Stupid?
Luis Izcovich, translated by Ed Pluth

A Paradigmatic Case of Brazilian National Stupidity: Olavo de Carvalho
Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker

Errare Humanum Est… On Psychoanalysis as Morosophy
Dany Nobus

Stupidity and Silence
Cindy Zeiher

The Zombification of the Symbolic
Rodrigo Gonsalves

Stupid Jokes
Jean-Michel Rabate

The Non-Duped between Stupidity and Mental Debility
Jelica Sumic

Kant, Lacan on Stupidity or the Impasses of the Power of Judgement
Rado Riha

For to Begin Yet Again: Rising Ground(s) of Stupidity in Deleuze-Lacan
James Martel

Lacan and Pigeons
Antonio Viselli

Stupidity and Psychoanalysis

Edited by Cindy Zeiher

Stupidity and Psychoanalysis

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