What Lacan Said About Women

What Lacan Said About Women

Author: Colette Soler

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2020-10-06

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1635421292

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The definitive work on Lacan's theory of the feminine. With exquisite prose and penetrating insights, Colette Soler shares her theoretical and clinical expertise in this vibrant new text. She spins out seductive explications of Lacan's thought on the controversial question of sexual difference. With the subtlety that these topics deserve, she takes up Lacan's conception of woman and her relation to masochism, femininity and hysteria, love and death, and the impossible sexual relation. Following more than the usual suspects, What Lacan Said About Women also explores the mother's place in the unconscious, how Lacan understands depression, and why depressives feel unloved. Soler's analysis examines the cultural implications of the texts that Lacan produced from the 1950s to the 1970s, such as the effects of science on contemporary conceptions of the feminine. She gracefully bridges the gap still left open between psychoanalysis and cultural studies. Winner of the Prix Psyche for the best work published in the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis in 2003, this book will appeal to cultural critics, especially those in gender and women's studies, as well as to anyone involved in contemporary theory or clinical practice. This study will transform novices within the field of Lacanian theory into informed thinkers and it will substantially supplement and refine the knowledge of Lacanian veterans.


Imagine There's No Woman

Imagine There's No Woman

Author: Joan Copjec

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-09-17

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780262532709

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A psychoanalytic and philosophical exploration of sublimation as a key term in Jacques Lacan's theories of ethics and feminine sexuality. Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including the infamous proposition, "the Woman does not exist," constituted a revision of his earlier work on "the ethics of psychoanalysis." In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become the key term in his ethics. To trace the link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take the negative proposition about the woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about the existence of universals, but as recognition of the power of thought, which posits and gives birth to the difference of objects from themselves. While the relativist position currently dominant insists on the difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within the object I see. The popular position fuels the disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas the Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention. In the book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, the silhouettes by the young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in the well-known melodrama. In the second part, the focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, the cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and the difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, the film noir classic Laura, and the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.


What Does a Woman Want?

What Does a Woman Want?

Author: Serge Andre

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 1999-03-17

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 189274628X

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Freud's question is at the root of his discoveries about the unconscious. Serge André says that a woman wants the truth, and, in this subtle and highly original comparison of Freud and Lacan, he explains why.


Feminine Sexuality

Feminine Sexuality

Author: Jacques Lacan

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 9780393302110

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Jacques Lacan is arguably the most controversial psychoanalyst of our time.


Does the Woman Exist?

Does the Woman Exist?

Author: Paul Verhaeghe

Publisher: Other Press (NY)

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781892746153

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This book describes how Freud attempted to chart hysteria, yet came to a standstill at the problem of woman and her desire, and of how Lacan continued along this road by creating new conceptual tools. The difficulties and upsets encountered by both men are examined. This lucid presentation of the dialectical process that carries Lacan through the evolution of Freud's thought offers profound insights into the place of the "feminine mystique" in our social fabric. Patiently and carefully, Verhaeghe applies the Lacanian grid to Freud's text and succeeds in explaining Lacan's formulations without merely recapitulating his theories. The reader is informed, along the way, not only of Lacan's take on Freudian ideas, but also of the array of interpretations emerging from other trends in post-Freudian literature, including feminist revisionism.


On Feminine Sexuality

On Feminine Sexuality

Author: Jacques Lacan

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 9780393045734

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In his psycholinguistic exploration of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge, Jacques Lacan leads into an new way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives.


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.


Sensible Ecstasy

Sensible Ecstasy

Author: Amy Hollywood

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010-01-15

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 0226349462

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Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism. What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.


The Cambridge Companion to Lacan

The Cambridge Companion to Lacan

Author: Jean-Michel Rabaté

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2003-07-31

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 1139826662

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This collection of specially commissioned essays by academics and practising psychoanalysts, first published in 2003, explores key dimensions of Jacques Lacan's life and works. Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at the time when it underwent a certain intellectual decline. Advocating a 'return to Freud', by which he meant a close reading in the original of Freud's works, he stressed the idea that the unconscious functions 'like a language'. All essays in this Companion focus on key terms in Lacan's often difficult and idiosyncratic developments of psychoanalysis. This volume will bring fresh, accessible perspectives to the work of this formidable and influential thinker. These essays, supported by a useful chronology and guide to further reading will prove invaluable to students and teachers alike.


Lacan and the Subject of Language (RLE: Lacan)

Lacan and the Subject of Language (RLE: Lacan)

Author: Ellie Ragland-Sullivan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-02-05

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 1317915925

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Originally published in 1991, this volume tackles the diverse teachings of the great psychoanalyst and theoretician. Written by some of the leading American and European Lacanian scholars and practitioners, the essays attempt to come to terms with his complex relation to the culture of contemporary psychoanalysis. The volume presents useful insights into Lacan’s innovative theories on the nature of language and the subject. Many of the essays probe the importance of psychoanalysis for problems of signifier and referent in the philosophy of language; others explore the difficulties men and women have in negotiating the sexual differences that divide them. A major contribution to the new reception of Jacques Lacan in the English-speaking world, Lacan and the Subject of Language will challenge those who believe that they have already ‘mastered’ Lacanian thought. The insights offered here will pave the way for further developments.