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This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, is a unique exploration of the novel aspects of perversion from the perspective of cruelty—a psychoanalytic study that has never been sufficiently undertaken in an English-speaking world. Instead of reducing the notion of perversion to cultural representations, a historical discourse or a clinical diagnosis, the authors in this collection draw on Freud, Kant, Hegel, Marquis de Sade, Derrida, Deleuze and Žižek to untie the knot of “psychic cruelty” intrinsic to perversion and therefore “de-sexualize” perverted acts. They do so by theorizing perversion in psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus complex, the-Name-of-the-Father and jouissance, and furthermore in the perspective of the clinics of neurosis and psychosis, in dialogue with a clinical praxis, philosophy and literature.
In Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis, Touria Mignotte explores an innovative conception of cruelty. Integrating the life sciences and quantum physics, this approach shows that cruelty structures the living just as much as the unconscious, and makes it possible to integrate the main psychoanalytic currents, notably Freud, Lacan, Winnicott, Klein, and the thinkers of autism, while renewing the place of psychoanalysis as a human science. The life sciences have given us an insight into the murderous struggles that unfold before the primitive environment consents to the emergence of life as a "primary destructive impulse." This book offers a deep exploration of this primitive cruelty and of the processes of pairing that it induces: Mignotte hypothesizes that cruelty pertains to the dynamics of the void from which the human being originates, and whose creative expansion manifests itself, at each birth, as a sexual excess threatening the primary oneness. Cruelty, Sexualit,y and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis thus posits the necessity of revisiting the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis within a new epistemological framework developed from the laws of the dynamics of the void and based on an analysis of the development of these dynamics through clinical symptomatology. From this new perspective, this book suggests that the narcissistic psychoses and contemporary pathologies may be seen as the enactment of the murder and incest induced by the jouissance of the primitive void. This book calls on psychoanalysts to become the testamentary witnesses of the inhuman sexuality of the primitive void and to allow themselves to be affected by the ferment of destabilization and dissociation from which it proceeds.
This book explores the importance of Lacan’s role as an irritant within psychoanalysis, and how Freud and Lacan saw that as key to ensuring that psychoanalysis remained fresh and vital rather than becoming obsolescent. Drawing on Freud’s thinking as well as Lacan’s, Rabate examines how Lacan’s unwillingness to allow psychoanalytic thinking to become stale or pigeonholed into one part of life was key in his thinking. By constantly returning to psychoanalytic ideas in new and evolving ways, Lacan kept psychoanalysis moving and changing, much as Socrates did for philosophical thinking in classical Athens. This ‘gadfly’ or irritant role gave him free reign to explore all aspects of psychoanalytic thinking and treatment, and how it can permeate all aspects of life, both in the consulting room and beyond. Drawing on a deep understanding of Lacan’s work as well as Freud’s, this book is key reading for all those seeking to understand why Lacan’s work remains so important and so challenging for contemporary psychoanalysis.
Norman Holland was unquestionably the leading 20th-century American psychoanalytic literary critic. Long known as the Dean of American psychoanalytic literary critics, Holland produced an enormous body of scholarship that appeals to both neophytes in the field and advanced researchers, many of whom have been influenced by his writings. Holland was one of the first proponents of reader-response criticism, the theorist of readers' identity themes, and the author of fifteen books that have become classics in the field. Jeffrey Berman analyzes all of Holland's books, and many of his 250 scholarly articles, highlighting continuities and discontinuities in the critic's thinking over time. A controversial if not polarizing figure, Holland is discussed in relation to his closest colleagues, including Murray Schwartz, Bernard Paris, and Leslie Fiedler, as well as his fiercest critics, among them Frederick Crews, David Bleich, and Jonathan Culler, creating a dynamic and personal portrait. Insofar as this text illuminates the evolving mind of a premier literary critic, it produces a parallel profile of the American reader, the primary object of Holland's extensive work.
Judith Still analyses Derrida's late writings on animals, especially his seminars The Beast and the Sovereign, to explore ethical questions of how humans treat animals and how we treat outsiders, from slaves to terrorists.
Brings Lacan and Nietzsche together as part of a common effort to rethink the tradition of Western ethics. Bringing together Jacques Lacan and Friedrich Nietzsche, Tim Themi focuses on their conceptions of ethics and on their accounts of the history of ethical thinking in the Western tradition. Nietzsche blames Plato for setting in motion a degenerative process that turned ethics away from nature, the body, and its senses, and thus eventually against our capacities for reason, science, and a creative, flourishing life. Dismissing Plato’s Supreme Good as a “mirage,” Lacan is very much in sympathy with Nietzsche’s reading. Following this premise, Themi shows how Lacan’s ethics might build on Nietzsche’s work, thus contributing to our understanding of Nietzsche, and also how Nietzsche’s critique can strengthen our understanding of Lacan.
Taxidermy and the Gothic: The Horror of Still Life is the first extended study of the Gothic’s collusion with taxidermy. It tells the story of the emergence in the long nineteenth century of the twin golden ages of the Gothic genre and the practice of taxidermy, and their shared rhetorical and narratological strategies, anxieties, and sensibilities. It follows the thread into twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, including recent horror film, fiction, television, and visual arts to argue that the Gothic and taxidermy are two discursive bodies, stuffed and stitched together. Moving beyond the well-worn path that treats taxidermy as a sentimental art or art of mourning, this book takes readers down a new dark trail, finding an overlooked but rich tradition in the Gothic that aligns it with the affective and corporeal work of horror and the unsettling aesthetics, experiences, and pleasures that come with it. Over the course of four chapters, it argues that in addition to entwined origins, taxidermy’s uncanny appearance in Gothic and horror texts is a driving force in generating fear. For taxidermy embodies the phenomenological horror of stuckness, of being there. In sum, taxidermy’s imbrication with the Gothic is more than skin deep: these are rich discourses stuffed by affinities for corporeal transgressions, the uncanny, and the counterfeit.
Philosophy reads humanity against animality, arguing that "man" is man because he is separate from beast. Deftly challenging this position, Kelly Oliver proves that, in fact, it is the animal that teaches us to be human. Through their sex, their habits, and our perception of their purpose, animals show us how not to be them. This kinship plays out in a number of ways. We sacrifice animals to establish human kinship, but without the animal, the bonds of "brotherhood" fall apart. Either kinship with animals is possible or kinship with humans is impossible. Philosophy holds that humans and animals are distinct, but in defending this position, the discipline depends on a discourse that relies on the animal for its very definition of the human. Through these and other examples, Oliver does more than just establish an animal ethics. She transforms ethics by showing how its very origin is dependent upon the animal. Examining for the first time the treatment of the animal in the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, Agamben, Freud, Lacan, and Kristeva, among others, Animal Lessons argues that the animal bites back, thereby reopening the question of the animal for philosophy.
Lacan: A Genealogy provides a genealogical account of Lacan's work as a whole, from his early writings on paranoid psychosis to his later work on the real and surplus enjoyment. Beistegui argues that Lacan's work requires an in-depth genealogy to chart and interpret the his key concept of desire. The genealogy is both a historical and critical approach, inspired by Foucault, which consists in asking how – that is, by what theoretical and practical transformations, by the emergence of which discourses of truth, which institutions, and which power relations – our current subjectivity was shaped. Desire is a crucial thread throughout because it lies at the heart not only of liberal political economy, psychiatry and psychopathology, and the various discourses of recognition (from philosophy to psychology and the law) that shape our current politics of identity, but also, and more importantly, of the manner in which we understand, experience and indeed govern ourselves, ethically and politically. A novel reading of Lacan that foregrounds the radicality and urgency of his concepts and the relationship between desire, norm and the law.
Draws from the work of Jacques Lacan to provide innovative readings of Romantic literature in the long nineteenth century. Lacan and Romanticism uses the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to deliver progressive readings of Romanticism by examining canonical Romantic authors such as William Wordsworth, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Jane Austen, as well as lesser-known writers such as the graveyard poets and Sarah Scott. The contributors develop innovative approaches to Lacanian literary studies, focusing on neglected or emergent areas of Lacan’s thought and approaching Lacan’s best-known work in unexpected ways. The essay topics include the visible and seeable, war, the death drive, nonhuman sexualities, sublimation, loss and mourning, utopia, capitalism, fantasy, and topology, and they range from the mid-eighteenth through the early decades of the nineteenth centuries. The book reveals new ways of thinking about art and literature with psychoanalytic theory and suggests how theoretical approaches can contribute meaningfully to literary studies in general. “Reading this book may well entice the Romanticist who isn’t already engaged in psychoanalytic theory to do so, and the Lacanian scholar—who may have concluded erroneously that Lacan’s last word on Romanticism was his criticism of some well-known lines from the Immortality ode—to reconsider the value of returning to Romantic literature and visual culture.” — Guinn Batten, author of The Orphaned Imagination: Melancholy and Commodity Culture in English Romanticism