Show Notes
On this episode, Ryan and Todd return to the topic of the superego to discuss--for the first time at length--the enjoyment particular to it. Superegoic enjoyment is an idea that first appears in Freud though it is not fully developed as a concept until Lacan (briefly) and Žižek (massively). For Žižek, transgression of the written law enables the group identification with a suspension of the law. This is crucial to the superegoic enjoyment we see in, for example, the banality of breaking the speed limit and the horror of militarized police brutally suppressing a protest movement under special orders. Ryan and Todd depart from Žižek's influential and important articulation of superegoic enjoyment by offering that it is not the obscene underside of the law but rather an internalization of the Big Other's demand that is the essential characteristic of the superego's injunction to enjoy.
More from Why Theory
REUPLOAD BECAUSE HALF THE EPISODE WAS MISSING: In this early release episode, Ryan and Todd discuss Alejandro González Iñárritu's recent film Digger. Widely panned upon its release a couple of weeks ago--though seemingly embraced by audiences and some contemporary revisions of initial reactions--Ryan and Todd extol the film's virtues. Chief among them being the film's insistence that we look at our contemporary situation regarding the climate from the position of retroactivity. The hosts bring to Freud's Future of an Illusion to bear on the film as well, tying it in to recent conversations. Try to see this movie before it leaves theaters forever, if you can. Bonus: Here's Calgary Flames goalie Devin Cooley espousing Why Theory's take on the unconscious dimension of sporting excellence.
On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss Freud's Future of an Illusion, a text that would become overshadowed by his subsequent publication, Civilization and Its Discontents. The hosts discuss the relationship between the two texts--paying close attention to how the drive becomes figured and then reconfigured in the latter text--but are careful to stamp out where Illusion departs in focus and in substance from one Freud's most well-known works. The hosts also work through Freud’s thoughts on religion in Illusion and compare it against his later thoughts in Moses and Monotheism and more recent work on psychoanalysis and religion (specifically when compared to Rick Boothby’s Embracing the Void).
On this episode, Ryan and Todd return to their film genre series to discuss the neo noir. As opposed to the classic noir period, which is named retroactively by French film critics (1941-1958), neo noir films were aware of how they fit into a specialized genre. Does this mean the Neo noir is more of a genre than the class noir? Less of one? Is it just a style? What unique affordances hold the genre together now that these films are made post-Code? This episode discusses these questions and more with extended reference to: The Long Goodbye, Body Heat, One False Move, and The Last Seduction among many other films.
On this episode, Ryan and Todd discuss the notion of divine violence. The conversation draws principally on an encounter staged between the term's evocation in Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay, "Toward a Critique of Violence" and the term's later deployment by Slavoj Žižek in his book On Violence. The conversation also touches on Giorgio Agamben's use of "bare life" (a phrase used, though translated slightly differently, by Benjamin in his essay) and how recent podcast conversations on Frantz Fanon overlap or depart from the concerns of divine violence.
On this episode, Ryan and Todd complete their Frantz Fanon duology by talking about his final completed work, Wretched of the Earth. The episode focuses on Fanon's "stretching" of both Marxism and psychoanalysis to ground his unique decolonial intervention.