1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910136641103321

Autore

Dean Carolyn J (Carolyn Janice), <1960->

Titolo

The self and its pleasures : Bataille, Lacan, and the history of the decentered subject / / Carolyn J. Dean

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Ithaca, NY : , : Cornell University Press, , [2016]

©1992

ISBN

1501705415

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (ix, 270 pages) : 4 halftones

Disciplina

155.209440904

Soggetti

LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part One Psychoanalysis and the Self -- 1. The Legal Status of the Irrational -- 2 . Gender Complexes -- 3 . Sight Unseen (Reading the Unconscious) -- Part Two Sade's Selflessness -- 4 . The Virtue of Crime -- 5 . The Pleasure of Pain -- Part Three Headlessness -- 6. Writing and Crime -- 7. Returning to the Scene of the Crime -- Conclusion -- Selected Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared belief that the boundaries between self and other had disappeared during the Great War helps explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts and literary works alike. The Self and Its Pleasures offers a pathbreaking understanding of the boundaries between theory and history.