Online research in philosophy

Jacques Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at a time when it faced certain intellectual decline. Focusing on key terms in Lacan's often difficult, idiosyncratic development of psychoanalysis, this volume brings new perspectives to the work of an intimidating influential thinker.

Yannis Stavrakakis moves beyond the standard discussion of the Lacanian concept of the subject in a socio-political context, toward an analysis of the objective side of human experience. In the first part of Lacan and the Political, the author highlights Lacan's innovative understanding of the sociopolitical field and offers a straightforward and systematic assessment of the importance of Lanca's categories and theoretical construction for concrete political analysis. The second half of he book applies Lacanian theory to specific examples of widely discussed political issues, such as Green ideology, the question of democracy and the hegemony of advertising in contemporary culture. Lacan and the Political demonstrates the immense potential of Lacanian thought to invigorate our consideration of the political and will be of interest to all who seek to further their understanding of modern ideological discourse in politics.

Grosz gives a critical overview of Lacan's work from a feminist perspective. Discussing previous attempts to give a feminist reading of his work, she argues for women's autonomy based on an indifference to the Lacanian phallus.

This paper argues that Badiou's and Lacan's theorizations of ethics offer a way to formulate an ethics of teaching and to explore what such an ethics might look like when teachers encounter events that disrupt their quotidian lives. Relying on the work of Badiou and Lacan, the paper critiques mainstream approaches to the ethics of teaching and sketches an alternative pedagogical ethics.

The giant of Ljubljana marshals some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Jacques Lacan.

In this original work of psychoanalytic theory, John Muller explores the formative power of signs and their impact on the mind, the body and subjectivity, giving special attention to work of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Muller explores how Lacan's way of understanding experience through three dimensions--the real, the imaginary and the symbolic--can be useful both for thinking about cultural phenomena and for understanding the complexities involved in treating psychotic patients. Muller develops Lacan's perspective gradually, presenting it as distinctive approaches to data from a variety of sources, such as cognitive, social and developmental psychology, literature, history, art, and psychoanalytic treatment. The book's first four chapters present Muller's reading of selected data from child development research, psychology and linguistics, approximating a semiotic model of "normal" development. The following three chapters examine in a Lacanian framework the structural basis of psychotic stages as indicative of massive semiotic failure in development. The final chapters on human narcissism suggest reasons that "normal" development may be impossible.

I explore Lacan’s theory of the subject by responding to two well-known criticisms of it, found in Borch-Jacobsen’s Lacan and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s The Title of the Letter. I argue that the relation of the subject to language is an important part of Lacan’s theory, but his conception of the subject cannot be reduced to language, as the critiques allege. The real must be included in the picture too. I then discuss the situation of Lacan’s subject between language and the real, and conclude with a contrast of Lacan’s subversion of the subject to a Derridean paleonymic approach.

The texts selected here present the entire scope of the Lacan debate, from the late 1970s through the present. Focusing on the four principal domains of Lacan's influence--psychoanalytic theory and practice, philosophy, social sciences, and cultural studies, this set includes a new introduction by the editor and a thorough index.