Beyond Sexuality

by Tim Dean

Overview

Beyond Sexuality points contemporary sexual politics in a radically new direction. Combining a psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious with a deep respect for the historical variability of sexual identities, this original work of queer theory makes the case for viewing erotic desire as fundamentally impersonal. Tim Dean develops a reading of Jacques Lacan that—rather than straightening out this notoriously difficult French psychoanalyst—brings out the queer tensions and productive incoherencies in his account of desire.

Dean shows how the Lacanian unconscious "deheterosexualizes" desire, and along the way he reveals how psychoanalytic thinkers as well as queer theorists have failed to exploit the full potential of this conception of desire. The book elaborates this by investigating social fantasies about homosexuality and AIDS, including gay men's own fantasies about sex and promiscuity, in an attempt to illuminate the challenges facing safe-sex education. Taking on many shibboleths in contemporary psychoanalysis and queer theory—and taking no prisoners—Beyond Sexuality offers an antidote to hagiographical strains in recent work on psychoanalysis, Foucault, and sexuality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226139357
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/01/2000
Edition description:	1
Pages:	318
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Tim Dean teaches in the Department of English and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Beyond the Couch
1. How to Read Lacan
2. Transcending Gender
3. The Psychoanalysis of AIDS
4. Safe-Sex Education and the Death Drive
5. Bodies That Mutter
6. Lacan Meets Queer Theory
Conclusion: The Ineluctability of Sublimation
References
Index of Names
Index of Psychoanalytic Concepts
 

Recipe

Beyond Sexuality points contemporary sexual politics in a radically new direction. Combining a psychoanalytic emphasis on the unconscious with a deep respect for the historical variability of sexual identities, this original work of queer theory makes the case for viewing erotic desire as fundamentally impersonal. Tim Dean develops a reading of Jacques Lacan that—rather than straightening out this notoriously difficult French psychoanalyst—brings out the queer tensions and productive incoherencies in his account of desire.

Dean shows how the Lacanian unconscious "deheterosexualizes" desire, and along the way he reveals how psychoanalytic thinkers as well as queer theorists have failed to exploit the full potential of this conception of desire. The book elaborates this by investigating social fantasies about homosexuality and AIDS, including gay men's own fantasies about sex and promiscuity, in an attempt to illuminate the challenges facing safe-sex education. Taking on many shibboleths in contemporary psychoanalysis and queer theory—and taking no prisoners—Beyond Sexuality offers an antidote to hagiographical strains in recent work on psychoanalysis, Foucault, and sexuality.

Editorial Reviews

Dean (English and critical theory, U. of Illinois) engages both queer theory and the work of European thinkers Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan in an examination of how continental psychoanalysis (as opposed to the American strain of psychoanalysis) and sexuality function and interact in social and cultural domains. Dean argues for an understanding of sexuality that comes from a radical impersonality of desire. He contends that the current understanding of sexual desire as being directed towards other persons leads to the continuing proliferation of harmful norms. The implications of his radical impersonality theory, he argues, would be that gayness would cease being defined primarily in terms of sex, because erotic desire would be fully disarticulated from personhood. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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