Books by Eran Dorfman
Routledge, 2020
The double, doppelgänger, is mostly understood as a peculiar figure that emerged in nineteenth-ce... more The double, doppelgänger, is mostly understood as a peculiar figure that emerged in nineteenth-century Romantic and gothic literature. Far from being a merely esoteric entity, however, this book argues that the double, although it mostly goes unnoticed, is a widespread phenomenon that has significant influence on our lives. It is an inherent key element of human subjectivity whose functions, forms, and effects have not yet gained the serious consideration they merit.
Drawing on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and combining a personal story with theoretical interventions, Double Trouble develops a novel understanding of the double and human subjectivity in the last two centuries. It begins with the singular and narcissistic double of Romanticism and gradually moves to the multiple doubles implicated by Postmodernism. The double is what defies unicity and opens up the subject to multiplicity. Consequently, it gradually emerges as a bridge between the I and the Other, identity and difference, philosophy and literature, theory and praxis.
https://www.routledge.com/Double-Trouble-The-Doppelganger-from-Romanticism-to-Postmodernism/Dorfman/p/book/9780367441449
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Rowman & Littlefield International , Jun 16, 2014
We are used to seeing the everyday as an ordinary aspect of life, something that we need to 'over... more We are used to seeing the everyday as an ordinary aspect of life, something that we need to 'overcome', whereas it actually plays a crucial role in any event of our lives. This highly original book engages with a range of thinkers and texts from across the fields of phenomenology, psychoanalysis and critical theory, including Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Freud and Benjamin, together with innovative analysis of French literature and the visual arts, to demonstrate that the role of repetition and deferral in modernity has changed dramatically. Rather than allowing the everyday gradually to integrate singular events into its repetitive texture, events are experienced now as self-enclosed entities, allegedly disconnected from the everyday, leading to its impoverishment. The book thus offers a novel understanding of being, body, trauma and shock, but within the framework of the everyday as a concept that deserves a theory of its very own.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Phaenomenologica 179, Springer, 2007
C’est en interrogeant la Phénoménologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty que cette étude... more C’est en interrogeant la Phénoménologie de la perception de Maurice Merleau-Ponty que cette étude tâche d’élaborer une conception de la philosophie comme un apprentissage perceptif qui dépasserait l’opposition entre théorie et praxis. Le sujet empirique et son « attitude naturelle » sont appelés à retrouver la couche pré-objective qui fonde le monde objectif, à retrouver le corps vivant qui fonde le corps constitué et figé. Mais la vie empirique semble résister à cet appel, de telle sorte que la phénoménologie, pour désavouer l’attitude naturelle sans la critiquer explicitement, se tourne vers un cas extrême, excessif, de cette même attitude: la pathologie.
Dans un deuxième temps, la théorie psychanalytique de Jacques Lacan est introduite pour montrer qu’il n’y a pas de vie pré-objective sans objectivité, de même qu’il n’y a pas de vie normale sans pathologie. Les rapports réciproques, ambigus, entre monde objectif et monde pré-objectif, entre normalité et pathologie, sont ici analysés pour permettre de voir que seul le mouvement perpétuel de l’un de ces pôles à l’autre peut constituer à la fois la vraie phénoménologie perceptive et l’existence enfin libre.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Edited Books by Eran Dorfman
Figures of the Unconscious, Leuven University Press, 2010
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers by Eran Dorfman
Continental Philosophy Review , 2022
This paper aims to clarify the role the double plays in the constitution of identity, focusing on... more This paper aims to clarify the role the double plays in the constitution of identity, focusing on the movement between the individual and the collective level. Notably, the latter today is often considered through the lens of identity politics. The double, I argue, poses an alternative to this type of politics, by showing the interdependence of groups. As a case study, this paper focuses on the complex relationship between the anti-Semite and the Jew as depicted by Sartre. I begin with a psychoanalytical examination of the figure of the double,follow on with an analysis of Sartre's work in the light of the double, and conclude with Girard's theory of mimetic desire.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Routledge, 2020
One of the oldest examples of sexuality's political potential appears in Aristophanes's comedy Ly... more One of the oldest examples of sexuality's political potential appears in Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece are tired of the ongoing war between their cities. Under the unifying leadership of Lysistrata, they declare that they will refuse to have sex with their husbands until the war is over, and miraculously enough, a peace treaty is signed much sooner than expected. The different peoples reconcile with each other, and so do the different sexes. Indeed, sexuality expresses much more than an intimate interaction between two bodies. It also involves various elements such as power, dominance, control, pleasure, and pain-elements that are inherent parts of any human interaction, from relationships between two people to complex social structures. These elements, however, are not static and take diverse shapes and forms according to the time and the place of their emergence. Sexuality changes accordingly in both its praxis and its discourse, interacting with different norms and codes that define what 'legitimate' sexuality is. The interesting question for our purposes, however, is not so much how sexuality is shaped by history-a question that has been studied extensively-but rather how sexuality may in turn shape history. What is the political potential of sexuality, and how can we realize it? In this respect, psychoanalysis may serve as a powerful tool of investigation. Indeed, sexual-ity has occupied a central place in psychoanalysis from the outset, and this place, moreover, has been the focal point of many criticisms and attacks against psychoanalysis. It is as if the way that psychoanalysis conceived of sexuality profoundly disturbed and threatened to reveal something hidden in society. The introduction of infantile sexuality, for instance, provoked outrage and disgust among conservative circles, which accused psychoanalysis of decadence and nihilism and of seeking to destabilize family and sexual norms. Later on, however, a contrary type of criticism was raised, one that considers psychoanalysis to be too conservative and oppressive. Psychoanalysis is actually both revolutionary and conservative, not because of Freud's own personality or other external factors but because of the very nature of what psychoanalysis investigates. On the one hand, it introduces blind forces, which are the drives: Libido (or Eros, the life drive) and Thanatos (the death drive). On the other hand, it focuses on the ways these forces are restricted by social norms and the various symptoms that are caused by these restrictions. Neither wishing to undo these norms nor aspiring to conserve them, psychoanalysis is content with describing the norms. Its aim is to find a cure for the symptoms within existing restrictions rather than to create a society with no symptoms at all.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
SubStance , 2017
This paper investigates the Platonic myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus in the light of the Derrid... more This paper investigates the Platonic myth of Epimetheus and Prometheus in the light of the Derridean notion of différance, claiming that each of the mythical brothers relates only to one element of the term; Epimetheus locating differences in space and Prometheus being imprisoned in temporal deferral. To better understand the various modes of différance I suggest turning to Freud’s theory of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) through which one repeats the past while acknowledging both its difference from the present and the inevitable deferral the process involves. I claim that psychoanalysis enacts the encounter between Epimetheus and Prometheus, thus uniting the two elements of différance.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In this paper I examine two limit cases in which the body is threatened: the experience of emerge... more In this paper I examine two limit cases in which the body is threatened: the experience of emergency as described by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras, and the experience of illness as described by Jean-Luc Nancy in his autobiographical essay The Intruder. In the first case, the everyday relationship to the body is revealed to be illusionary; the body becomes a powerful yet obedient machine. In the second case, the everyday relationship to the body is also suspended, but this time in favor of a weak and objectified body. I argue that these apparently opposite experiences actually presuppose a similar notion of the everyday body, which I further conceptualize, through Merleau-Ponty and his analysis of the body, as deficient and therefore inherently repressed. The paper concludes with the suggestion that writing about one’s own body may be seen as a way to fight the everyday tendency towards repression, and I propose overwriting as a term that can capture this process.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
in "Double Exposure" (Tel Aviv: SIPP, 2014)
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In Vinciguerra L. et Bourlez F. (ed.). L'oeil et l'esprit: Merleau-Ponty entre art et philosophie, Reims: Epure, 2010, pp. 61-69
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books by Eran Dorfman
Drawing on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and combining a personal story with theoretical interventions, Double Trouble develops a novel understanding of the double and human subjectivity in the last two centuries. It begins with the singular and narcissistic double of Romanticism and gradually moves to the multiple doubles implicated by Postmodernism. The double is what defies unicity and opens up the subject to multiplicity. Consequently, it gradually emerges as a bridge between the I and the Other, identity and difference, philosophy and literature, theory and praxis.
https://www.routledge.com/Double-Trouble-The-Doppelganger-from-Romanticism-to-Postmodernism/Dorfman/p/book/9780367441449
Dans un deuxième temps, la théorie psychanalytique de Jacques Lacan est introduite pour montrer qu’il n’y a pas de vie pré-objective sans objectivité, de même qu’il n’y a pas de vie normale sans pathologie. Les rapports réciproques, ambigus, entre monde objectif et monde pré-objectif, entre normalité et pathologie, sont ici analysés pour permettre de voir que seul le mouvement perpétuel de l’un de ces pôles à l’autre peut constituer à la fois la vraie phénoménologie perceptive et l’existence enfin libre.
Edited Books by Eran Dorfman
Papers by Eran Dorfman
Drawing on literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, and combining a personal story with theoretical interventions, Double Trouble develops a novel understanding of the double and human subjectivity in the last two centuries. It begins with the singular and narcissistic double of Romanticism and gradually moves to the multiple doubles implicated by Postmodernism. The double is what defies unicity and opens up the subject to multiplicity. Consequently, it gradually emerges as a bridge between the I and the Other, identity and difference, philosophy and literature, theory and praxis.
https://www.routledge.com/Double-Trouble-The-Doppelganger-from-Romanticism-to-Postmodernism/Dorfman/p/book/9780367441449
Dans un deuxième temps, la théorie psychanalytique de Jacques Lacan est introduite pour montrer qu’il n’y a pas de vie pré-objective sans objectivité, de même qu’il n’y a pas de vie normale sans pathologie. Les rapports réciproques, ambigus, entre monde objectif et monde pré-objectif, entre normalité et pathologie, sont ici analysés pour permettre de voir que seul le mouvement perpétuel de l’un de ces pôles à l’autre peut constituer à la fois la vraie phénoménologie perceptive et l’existence enfin libre.