Looking Awry

Looking Awry

Author: Slavoj Zizek

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1992-09-08

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780262740159

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Slavoj Žižek, a leading intellectual in the new social movements that are sweeping Eastern Europe, provides a virtuoso reading of Jacques Lacan. Žižek inverts current pedagogical strategies to explain the difficult philosophical underpinnings of the French theoretician and practician who revolutionized our view of psychoanalysis. He approaches Lacan through the motifs and works of contemporary popular culture, from Hitchcock's Vertigo to Stephen King's Pet Sematary, from McCullough's An Indecent Obsession to Romero's Return of the Living Dead—a strategy of "looking awry" that recalls the exhilarating and vital experience of Lacan. Žižek discovers fundamental Lacanian categories the triad Imaginary/Symbolic/Real, the object small a, the opposition of drive and desire, the split subject—at work in horror fiction, in detective thrillers, in romances, in the mass media's perception of ecological crisis, and, above all, in Alfred Hitchcock's films. The playfulness of Žižek's text, however, is entirely different from that associated with the deconstructive approach made famous by Derrida. By clarifying what Lacan is saying as well as what he is not saying, Žižek is uniquely able to distinguish Lacan from the poststructuralists who so often claim him.


Lacan at the Scene

Lacan at the Scene

Author: Henry Bond

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2012-09-21

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0262300095

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A Lacanian approach to murder scene investigation. What if Jacques Lacan—the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst—had worked as a police detective, applying his theories to solve crimes? This may conjure up a mental film clip starring Peter Sellers in a trench coat, but in Lacan at the Scene, Henry Bond makes a serious and provocative claim: that apparently impenetrable events of violent death can be more effectively unraveled with Lacan's theory of psychoanalysis than with elaborate, technologically advanced forensic tools. Bond's exposition on murder expands and develops a resolutely Žižekian approach. Seeking out radical and unexpected readings, Bond unpacks his material utilizing Lacan's neurosis-psychosis-perversion grid. Bond places Lacan at the crime scene and builds his argument through a series of archival crime scene photographs from the 1950s—the period when Lacan was developing his influential theories. It is not the horror of the ravished and mutilated corpses that draws his attention; instead, he interrogates seemingly minor details from the everyday, isolating and rephotographing what at first seems insignificant: a single high heeled shoe on a kitchen table, for example, or carefully folded clothes placed over a chair. From these mundane details he carefully builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI's standard-issue Crime Classification Manual.


Lines of Desire

Lines of Desire

Author: Hanjo Berressem

Publisher: Northwestern University Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 9780810113091

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This is an original analysis of the novels of Gombrowicz, a fascinating figure of the 20th-century European avante-garde. Berressem examines the novels in light of both contemporary literary theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis.


The Literary Lacan

The Literary Lacan

Author: Santanu Biswas

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13:

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Some of the most well-known psychoanalysts and literary theorists explore Jacques Lacan's influence on literature. The relationship between literature and psychology is long and richly complex, and no more so than in the work of Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. The Literary Lacan: From Literature to "Lituraterre" and Beyond is dedicated to assessing Lacan's significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first essays in this collection provide close readings of Lacan's literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguerite Duras and Lewis Carroll, his concept of Lituraterre, and his seminar on James Joyce. Other essays examine Lacan's theories in conjunction with the works of major writers such as Samuel Beckett. The book concludes with essays that investigate Lacan and literature more broadly, including the applicability of literature to psychoanalysis. With well-known contributors including Slavoj Zizek, Jacques-Alain Miller, Russell Grigg, and Ellie Ragland, this volume will appeal not only to specialists in literary and Lacanian theory but also to students and enthusiasts of the master and the literature that inspired him.


Lacan and Literature

Lacan and Literature

Author: Ben Stoltzfus

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 1996-07-03

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1438421362

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Winner of the 1997 Gradiva Award for Best Book (Cultural Arts Related) awarded by the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP) Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to uncover the relationship between literature, reading, and the unconscious, this book argues for a special affinity between a text and its reader. This process strives to unveil the disguises of tropic language in order to generate manifest meaning from latent content. Focusing on five twentieth-century writers: D.H. Lawrence, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, Roland Barthes, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, this book shows how Freud's theories of condensation and displacement in dreams match Lacan's uses of metaphor and metonymy in language. Despite the different backgrounds of these authors from America, England, and France, the unifying theme is that the unconscious (because it is structured like language) is the voice of the (m)Other disguised in figurative language.


Reading Lacan

Reading Lacan

Author: Jane Gallop

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780801494437

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The influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has extended into nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences--from literature and film studies to anthropology and social work. yet Lacan's major text, Ecrits, continues to perplex and even baffle its readers. In Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop offers a novel approach to Lacan's work based on his own theories of language. Lacan locates truth in the letter rather than in the spirit-in the ways statements are expressed rather than in their intended meaning. Gallop here grapples with six of Lacan's essays from Ecrits: "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter, ' " "The Mirror Stage," "The Freudian Thing, '' "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, '' "The Signification of the Phallus," and "The Subversion of the Subject." While other commentators have chosen not to confront Lacan's notoriously problematic style in their discussions of his ideas, Gallop addresses herself directly to the problem and the practice of reading Lacan. She takes her direction from Lacan's view of subjectivity and offers a deeply personal, feminist reading of Ecrits. Concentrating on the relation of desire and interpretation, she opens up the rich implications of Lacan's thought, for psychoanalytic theory, for the act of reading, and for knowledge itself. Forceful and revealing, yet utterly candid about its own areas of uncertainty, Gallop's book will be indispensable to readers of Lacan and to scholars and students who have felt his impact.


Freud, Proust and Lacan

Freud, Proust and Lacan

Author: Malcolm Bowie

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780521275880

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The views of Freud, Proust and Lacan are depicted through this staging of a series of provocative dialogues between psychological science and imaginative literature of the twentieth century.


Lacan and Fantasy Literature

Lacan and Fantasy Literature

Author: Josephine Sharoni

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 9004336583

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Eschewing the all-pervading contextual approach to literary criticism, this book takes a Lacanian view of several popular British fantasy texts of the late 19th century such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, revealing the significance of the historical context; the advent of a modern democratic urban society in place of the traditional agrarian one. Moreover, counter-intuitively it turns out that fantasy literature is analogous to modern Galilean science in its manipulation of the symbolic thereby changing our conception of reality. It is imaginary devices such as vampires and ape-men, which in conjunction with Lacanian theory say something additional of the truth about – primarily sexual – aspects of human subjectivity and culture, repressed by the contemporary hegemonic discourses.


Lacan Today

Lacan Today

Author: Alexandre Leupin

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2004-11-17

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 9781892746900

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Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion offers a lucid overview of the French psychoanalyst's work. In five sections--"The Structure of the Subject," "Epistemology," "Four Discourses," "There is No Sexual Rapport," and "God is Real,"--the book maps out Lacan's thought for the lay reader with unmatched clarity. It does this by building from Lacan's graph and formulas, which are often misunderstood. This formalization acts as a pedagogical tool of wonderful economy, offering a broad overview without neglecting the essential details. The chapters are summarized by a general graph that visually demonstrates Lacan's rigor and coherence. The book examines often-neglected aspects of Lacan's work, like problems in the history of science, epistemology, and religion, in order to show Lacan's relevance to today's world. It makes the case for Lacan as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, whose reach extends beyond the discipline of psychoanalysis. Indeed, Lacan's thought should lead readers into a reexamination of philosophy, literature, art, politics, economy, and desire. In his introduction, Alexandre Leupin writes: "If the unconscious exists, then Lacan is the only twentieth-century thinker who has drawn the consequences of Freud's discovery to their ultimate limits. I propose here what some will take as bombastic hyperbole: Lacan's radical reevaluation of human thinking is comparable to Einstein's." Though Lacan's thought is making tremendous inroads in countries of Latin culture, it has been slowly fading from public awareness in the English-speaking world. Often Lacan has been nothing more than a pawn in the bundling of contradictory doctrines labeled as "French thought"; or he has been reduced to a means of exchange between psychoanalysts or specialists in the humanities. Leupin's contention is that what Lacan said or wrote is of interest to the general public and that his consignment to oblivion is reversible. This book demonstrates that Lacan's thinking has vast implications, not only for college professors or practicing psychoanalysts, but also for scientists, epistemologists, and every man and woman.