1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910456841003321

Autore

Shepherdson Charles

Titolo

Lacan and the limits of language [[electronic resource] /] / Charles Shepherdson

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, : Fordham University Press, c2008

ISBN

0-8232-3784-2

0-8232-3535-1

0-8232-4723-6

1-282-69847-8

9786612698477

0-8232-2768-5

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (243 p.)

Disciplina

150.19/5092

Soggetti

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / General

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 201-222).

Nota di contenuto

The intimate alterity of the real -- The atrocity of desire : of love and beauty in Lacan's Antigone -- Emotion, affect, drive -- Telling tales of love : philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis -- The place of memory in psychoanalysis -- Human diversity and the sexual relation.

Sommario/riassunto

This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan’s purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, it aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory.By stressing the



question of affect, the book shows how Lacan’s position cannot be reduced to the structuralist models he nevertheless draws upon, and thus how the problem of the body may be understood as a formation that marks the limits of language. Exploring the anthropological category of “race” within a broadly evolutionary perspective, it shows how Lacan’s elaboration of the “imaginary” and the “symbolic” might allow us to explain human physiological diversity without reducing it to a cultural or linguistic construction or allowing “race” to remain as a traditional biological category. Here again the questions of history and temporality are paramount, and open the possibility for a genuine dialogue between psychoanalysis and biology.Finally, the book engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself.