Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy

This is a radical reconstruction of how psychoanalysis operates and a renewed sense of its indispensable power. Psychoanalysis was the most important intellectual development of the 20th century. From psychiatry to politics, it left no field untouched. Yet it is itself an untouchable discipline: not really science, not really criticism. Alain Badiou described psychoanalysis as an ‘antiphilosophy’: a practice that offers the strongest possible challenges to thought. Now, Justin Clemens examines psychoanalysis under this rubric. He shows how this impacts on the key concepts that continue to be misrepresented by disciplines hostile to psychoanalysis; above all, regarding the relationships of humans to drugs, animality and sexuality. It analyses psychoanalysis in a new way, under the rubric of ‘antiphilosophy’. It identifies and clarifies a set of previously undeveloped psychoanalytic concepts: torture, slavery and swarming. It applies these concepts to a range of key topics raised in the work of theorists including Freud, Lacan, Zizek and Agamben.