Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics. Bringing together Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim Themi focuses on their conceptions of ethics and on their accounts of the history of ethical thinking in the Western tradition. Nietzsche blames Plato for setting in motion a degenerative process that turned ethics away from nature, the body, and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for reason, science, and a creative, flourishing life. Dismissing Plato’s Supreme Good as a “mirage,” Lacan is very much in sympathy with Nietzsche’s reading. Following this premise, Themi shows how Lacan’s ethics might build on Nietzsche’s work, thus contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche, and also how Nietzsche’s critique can strengthen our understanding of Lacan.

Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics implicit in each and how this invokes an erotic process celebrating the real of what is usually excluded from articulation. Bataille came to deem eroticism as the standpoint from which to grasp humanity as a whole, based on his understanding of our transition to humanity being founded on a series of taboos placed on inner animality. An erotic outlet for the latter was historically the aesthetic dimensions of our religions, but Bataille’s view of how this was gradually diminished has much in keeping with Nietzsche’s critique of Christian-Platonic dualism and Lacan’s of the desexualised Good of Western metaphysics. Building from these often surprising proximities, Themi closely examines Bataille’s many interventions into the history of aesthetics — from his confrontations with Breton’s surrealism to his own novels and encounter with the animal cave paintings of Lascaux — radically re-illuminating the corollary phenomena of Dionysos in Nietzsche’s philosophy and the “jouissance [enjoyment] of transgression” in the psychoanalysis of Lacan. A new ethical criterion for aesthetic works and creations on this basis becomes possible.

The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy: Perspectives Across the Humanities is an interdisciplinary study of the abiding quarrel to which poet-philosopher Plato referred centuries ago in the Republic. The book presents eight chapters by four humanities scholars that historically contextualize and cross-interpret aspects of the quarrel in question. The authors share the view that although poets and philosophers continually quarrel, a harmonious union between the two groups is achievable in a manner promising application to a variety of contemporary cultural-political and aesthetic debates, all of which have implications for the current status of the humanities.

With its privileging of the unconscious, Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic thought would seem to be at odds with the goals and methods of philosophy. Lacan himself embraced the term "anti-philosophy" in characterizing his work, and yet his seminars undeniably evince rich engagement with the Western philosophical tradition. These essays explore how Lacan's work challenges and builds on this tradition of ethical and political thought, connecting his "ethics of psychoanalysis" to both the classical Greek tradition of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and to the Enlightenment tradition of Kant, Hegel, and de Sade. Charles Freeland shows how Lacan critically addressed some of the key ethical concerns of those traditions: the pursuit of truth and the ethical good, the ideals of self-knowledge and the care of the soul, and the relation of moral law to the tragic dimensions of death and desire. Rather than sustaining the characterization of Lacan's work as "anti-philosophical," these essays identify a resonance capable of enriching philosophy by opening it to wider and evermore challenging perspectives.

Friedrich Nietzsche believed his own work represented the dawning of a new historical era, and, despite the fact that he lived most of his sane life suffering in obscurity, it is not an exaggeration to say that his vision helped lay the foundations for modernism in style, substance and attitude. Nietzsche was himself devoted to the modern, for he reinterpreted every philosophy, every historical figure and event, every movement that came before him. This reconceptualization of the past through new, modern eyes opened up Nietzsche's thinking to exploring daring possibilities for the future. This prophetic boldness, which is so unique to his style, seduced the modernist generation across the spectrum. He was read by early Zionists as well as by Nazi racial theorists; by Thomas Mann and as well as by Salvador Dali. His influence stretched from psychoanalysis to anarchist politics. Understanding Nietzsche, Understanding Modernism traces the effect of Nietzsche's thinking upon a diverse set of problems: from ontology, to politics, to musical and literary aesthetics. The first section of the volume is a series of essays, each exploring a major work of Nietzsche's, explaining its significance while contributing new interpretations of the text. The middle portion connects Nietzsche's thought to the various strands of modernism in which it reveals itself. The final section is a glossary of key terms that Nietzsche uses throughout his works. An excellent resource for any scholar attempting to conceptualize the foundations of modernism or the historical importance of Nietzsche, this volume seeks to outline the philosopher's works and their reception amongst the generations that immediately followed his passing.

Many of the leading Freudian analysts, including in the early days, Jung, Adler, Reich and Rank, attempted to link the writings of Nietzsche with the clinical work of Freud. But what was Nietzsche to Freud--an intuitive anticipation, a precursor, a rival psychologist? Assoun moves beyond the seduction of these attractive analogues to a deeper analysis of the relation between these two figures.

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