Read my desire : Lacan against the historicists
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Read my desire : Lacan against the historicists
(October books)
MIT Press, c1994
Available at 24 libraries
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Note
"Many of the chapters in this book appeared in earlier versions as essays in various journals and books"--T.p. verso
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In this text, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its complex functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be "literate in desire," that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements. Choosing a variety of battlegrounds, from historical phenomena - the 40,000 unsettling photographs of Moroccan drapery taken by Lacan's mentor, G.G. de Clerambault; the coincidence between vampire literature and the eighteenth-century imperative to breast-feed; the recurrent emptiness of urban spaces in film noir; the rise of democracy and questions of human rights - to theoretical concepts such as the gaze, cause and sexual difference, Copjec imagines the blows that each contender might strike.
Although Lacan emerges the victor, one has a sense that for Copjec the contest is close, that she is interested not in simply dismissing Foucault but in seizing his theory at those moments when its concerns and strategies are similar to Lacan's. She is intent on understanding how two compelling theories come to diverge, how small differences distort common assumptions. Establishing the links between psychoanalysis and critical philosophy, Copjec treats psychoanalysis not as a private language but as the mother tongue of modernity. She thus makes Lacan's famous "return to Freud" a return, as well, to the best principles of the Enlightenment. By this manoeuvre she forces us to question the historicist dialect that we have been taught to speak and that we all but take for granted and to regret the loss in it of psychoanalysis's more rousing accents.
Table of Contents
- Introduction - structures don't march in the streets
- the orthopsychic subject - film theory and the reception of Lacan - the screen as mirror, orthopsychism, the mirror as screen
- cutting up - the death drive - Freud and Bergson, cause - Lacan and Aristotle, Achilles and the tortoise, cause and the law
- the sartorial superego - colonies and colonnades, guilty versus useful pleasures, beyond the good neighbour principle, fantasy and fetish
- vampires, breast-feeding, and anxiety - the drying up of the breast, breast-feeding and freedom
- the Unvermoegender other - hysteria and democracy in America - the teflon totem, the modern forms of power
- locked room/lonely room - private space in film noir - the actuarial origins of detective fiction, the locked-room paradox and the group, detour through the drive, the voice and the voice-over, locked room/lonely room, lethal jouissance and the femme fatale
- sex and the euthanasia of reason - the phallic function, the female side - mathematical failure, the male side - dynamical failure, sexual difference and the superego.
by "Nielsen BookData"