Philosophy After Lacan

Using Jacques Lacan's work as a key, Boothby reassesses Freud's most ambitious-and misunderstood-attempt at a general theory of mental functioning: metapsychology

After Lacan combines abundant case material with graceful yet sophisticated theoretical exposition in order to explore the clinical practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Focusing on the groundbreaking clinical treatment of psychosis that Gifric (Groupe Interdisciplinaire Freudien de Recherches et d'Interventions Cliniques et Culturelles) has pioneered in Quebec, the authors discuss how Lacanians theorize psychosis and how Gifric has come to treat it analytically. Chapters are devoted to the general concepts and key terms that constitute the touchstones of the early phase of analytic treatment, elaborating their interrelations and their clinical relevance. The second phase of analytic treatment is also discussed, introducing a new set of terms to understand transference and the ethical act of analysis in the subject's assumption of the Other's lack. The concluding chapters broaden discussion to include the key psychic structures that describe the organization of subjectivity and thereby dictate the terms of analysis: not just psychosis, but also perversion and obsessional and hysterical neurosis.

This book explores the phases of Jacques Lacan's career and examines the past, present, and future of psychoanalysis.

Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badiou’s seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou’s year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking. In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan’s theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the “anti-philosopher,” a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou’s own thought. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou’s more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.

Closely examining Jacques Lacan's unique mode of engagement with philosophy, Lacan with the Philosophers sheds new light on the interdisciplinary relations between philosophy and psychoanalysis. While highlighting the philosophies fundamental to the study of Lacan’s psychanalysis, Ruth Ronen reveals how Lacan resisted the straightforward use of these works. Lacan’s use of philosophy actually has a startling effect in not only providing exceptional entries into the philosophical texts (of Aristotle, Descartes, Kant and Hegel), but also in exposing the affinity between philosophy and psychoanalysis around shared concepts (including truth, the unconscious, and desire), and at the same time affirming the irreducible difference between the analyst and the philosopher. Inspired by Lacan’s resistance to philosophy, Ruth Ronen addresses Lacan’s use of philosophy to create a fertile moment of exchange. Straddling the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis with equal emphasis, Lacan with the Philosophers develops a unique interdisciplinary analysis and offers a new perspective on the body of Lacan’s writings.

Jacques Lacan was fascinated with forms of the "religious" throughout his life, from monotheism, which shaped his account of the signifier, to modern occultism, as he was well acquainted with the writings of figures such as Oskar Goldberg and René Guénon. Lacan also repeatedly turned to non-European religiosities to test the limits of psychoanalytic theory. In his yearly seminars he engaged with traditions such as Kabbalah and Taoism, going beyond the Western Christian, capitalist and postcolonial setting of the French university to search for a possible outside to psychoanalysis. But such a quest ultimately recapitulates Lacan's constant awareness of the desire for a new master, and the still open question regarding the names and meanings that this desire may yield. This anthology of eleven essays, which travel from gnosticism to sufism, from afro-pessimism to post-68 ex-Maoist apocalypticism, investigates these unresolved threads that Lacan left behind. Beneath the exoteric psychoanalytic apparatus of Lacan's thought, there is an esoteric Lacan who remains unexplored.

Philosophy After Lacan: Politics, Science, and Art brings together reflections on contemporary philosophy inspired by and in dialogue with Lacanian theory. Rather than focus on the thinkers who came before Lacan, the editors maintain attention on innovations in contemporary philosophy that owe their emergence to complimentary, critical, direct, or tangential engagement with Lacan. This collection makes one of the first concerted efforts to expand discussions between psychoanalysis and more recent philosophical thinkers while gathering chapters by some of the leading philosophical voices of the present moment. With contributors from around the world, this book has international appeal and is unique in its emphasis on contemporary philosophies inspired or influenced by Lacan. Philosophy After Lacan will not only appeal to psychotherapists and psychoanalysts, but also to students and professors of philosophy, critical theory, psychology, politics, history, and literature.

Using the concepts developed by Lacan to analyse the inner logic of Freud's thought Samuels provides a bridge between Lacanian theory and traditional categories of psychoanalytic theory and practice.

Offers an analysis of Jacques Lacan's thought for the English-speaking world. Using empirical data as well as Lacan's texts, this title demonstrates how Lacan's teachings constitute a new epistemology that goes far beyond conventional thinking in psychoanalysis, psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.

Post-Rationalism takes the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Cahiers pour l'Analyse, as its main source. Established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966, the journal has rarely figured in the literature, although it contained the first published work of authors now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Luce Irigaray, André Green and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Cahiers served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including the influential reinvention of Freud and Marx undertaken by Lacan and Althusser, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyré. This book is a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual foundations of structuralism, re-connecting the work of young post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian theorists with their predecessors in French philosophy of science. Tom Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period, focussing on the ways in which French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s - especially that of Bachelard and Canguilhem - laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.