How to Read Lacan

by Slavoj Zizek, Simon Critchley

Overview

“The only thing of which one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire.”—Jacques Lacan

The How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon. These books use excerpts from the major texts to explain essential topics, such as Jacques Lacan's core ideas about enjoyment, which re-created our concept of psychoanalysis.

Lacan’s motto of the ethics of psychoanalysis involves a profound paradox. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented access to "normal" sexual enjoyment; today, however, we are bombarded by different versions of the injunction "Enjoy!" Psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy.

Slavoj Žižek’s passionate defense of Lacan reasserts Lacan’s ethical urgency. For Lacan, psychoanalysis is a procedure of reading and each chapter reads a passage from Lacan as a tool to interpret another text from philosophy, art or popular ideology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393329551
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/17/2007
Series:	How to Read
Pages:	144
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and psychoanalyst, heads the International Center of Humanities at Birkbeck College. His numerous books, translated into more than thirty languages, include The Parallax View and Lacan: The Silent Partners.

Simon Critchley is a best-selling author and the Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His many books include The Book of Dead Philosophers, Bowie, and Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Foreword     viii
Introduction     1
Empty Gestures and Performatives: Lacan Confronts the CIA Plot     7
The Interpassive Subject: Lacan Turns a Prayer Wheel     22
From Che vuoi? to Fantasy: Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut     40
Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien     61
Ego Ideal and Superego: Lacan as a Viewer of Casablanca     79
'God is dead, but He doesn't Know it': Lacan Plays with Bobok     91
The Perverse Subject of Politics: Lacan as a Reader of Mohammad Bouyeri     105
Notes     121
Chronology     125
Suggestions for Further Reading     128
Index     131