Jean-Michel Rabaté offers a systematic genealogy of Lacan's theory of literature, reconstructing an original doctrine based upon Freudian insights and revitalized through close readings of authors as diverse as Poe, Gide, Shakespeare, Plato, Claudel, Sophocles, Sade, Genet, Duras, and Joyce. Not simply an essay about Lacan's influences or style, this book shows how the emergence of terms like the "letter" and the "symptom" would not have been possible without innovative readings of literary texts. Lacan's critique of "applied psychoanalysis" entails a new practice of psychoanalysis understood as a type of textual reading of the Unconscious.
What Does a Woman Want? (The Lacanian Clinical Field)
Freud's question is at the root of his discoveries about the unconscious. Serge Andre says that a woman wants the truth, and, in this subtle and highly original comparison of Freud and Lacan, he explains why.
A major comparative study of two giants of contemporary thought, this text reads Derrida's deconstruction against Lacan's psychoanalytic thought and argues that Lacan presents a form of deconstruction that is distinct from Derrida's.
Genius and charismatic leader of a psychoanalytic movement that in the 1950s and 1960s provided a focal point for the French intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan attracted a cult following. Ecrits is his most important work, bringing together twenty-seven articles and lectures originally published between 1936 and 1966. Following its first publication in 1966, the book gained Lacan international attention and exercised a powerful influence on contemporary intellectual life. To this day, Lacan's radical, brilliant and complex ideas continue to be highly influential in everything from film theory to art history and literary criticism. Ecrits is the essential source for anyone who seeks to understand this seminal thinker and his influence on contemporary thought and culture.
Louis Althusser is perhaps better remembered for strangling his wife to death during a fit of temporary insanity than for most of his writings (with the possible exception of his essay on the "ideological state apparatus," an explication of normalizing social institutions that has become standard fare in academic postmodernism), but he was one of the key figures in postwar French philosophy. Writings on Psychoanalysis is a collection of essays, article drafts, and correspondence that displays the extent of his intellectual grappling with Freud's writings and with contemporary psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, a former friend whom Althusser would gradually come to view as a "magnificent and pitiful Harlequin." (Two of the pieces here deal with the 1980 conference at which Althusser vehemently broke with Lacan, ostensibly over the latter's stifling position of dominance among their colleagues.) Writings on Psychoanalysis is a bit heavy-going and theoretical in places, but of unique historical interest.
