Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists

by Joan Copjec

Overview

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines—psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking 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 history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan’s explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is “literate in desire,” and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781781688892
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	06/09/2015
Series:	Radical Thinkers
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

Joan Copjec is Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She has written or edited eleven books, including Supposing the Subject and Radical Evil.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1 Introduction: Structures Don't March in the Streets 1

2 The Orthopsychic Subject: Film Theory and the Reception of Lacan 15

The Screen as Mirror

Orthopsychism

The Mirror as Screen

3 Cutting Up 39

The Death Drive: Freud and Bergson

Cause: Lacan and Aristotle

Achilles and the Tortoise

Cause and the Law

4 The Sartorial Superego 65

Colonies and Colonnades

Guilty versus Useful Pleasures

Beyond the Good Neighbor Principle

Fantasy and Fetish

5 Vampires, Breast-Feeding, and Anxiety 117

The Drying Up of the Breast

Breast-Feeding and Freedom

6 The Unvermögender Other: Hysteria and Democracy in America 141

The Teflon Totem

The Modern Forms of Power

7 Locked Room/Lonely Room: Private Space in Film Noir 163

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

8 Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason 201

The Phallic Function

The Female Side: Mathematical Failure

The Male Side: Dynamical Failure

Sexual Difference and the Superego

Notes 237

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

After Read My Desire, nothing in the domain of cultural studies will remain quite the same: cinema theory, feminism, philosophy, and psychoanalysis will have to relate to each other in an entirely new way. For the first time, an American author has taken Lacan seriously, relegating to well-deserved irrelevance the prevailing appropriation of the Lacanian theory by cultural studies. Far beyond political correctness, the book is theoretically correct: If it didn’t exist, one would have to invent it!”
—Slavoj Žižek

From the Publisher