From Cogito to Covid

This edited collection examines the contemporary relevance of Lacan's 1965 essay "Science and Truth" to debates on science, psychoanalysis, ethics and truth. In doing so, it re-considers the established understanding of its argument that psychoanalysis is the only science for the human subject. Over fifty years after Lacan attempted to formalize the relationship between science and psychoanalysis in "Science and Truth," this volume returns to thecategorically systematic yet deeply puzzling ideas of this lecture-turned-essay. Thevolume begins with a rigorous analysis of the formal logic animating the cogito, whichserves as a foundation for the remainder of the book to force a confrontation betweenthe themes laid out in "Science and Truth" and the cultural, intellectual, political,economic, and, of course, scientific movements that we face today. The following fivechapters examine various contemporary phenomena, including the destabilizing forcesof post-truthism and political nihilism, the 'non-science' of filmic depictions of science,the prosopopeia of Lacan's so-called secular Name of the Father, the pseudoscientificdiscourse of involuntary celibates, or 'incels,' and, finally, the alliance between science and capitalism that has developed out of the Covid-19 pandemic. This project offers an important contribution to contemporary debates about science and ethics that will be of interest to academics working in psychoanalytic and critical theory, and the philosophy and history of science; as well as to clinicians.