Lacanian Realism: Political and Clinical Psychoanalysis

by Duane Rousselle

Overview

Alain Badiou has claimed that Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude (Bloomsbury, 2008) “opened up a new path in the history of philosophy.” And so, whether you agree or disagree with the speculative realism movement, it has to be addressed. Lacanian Realism does just that. This book reconstructs Lacanian dogma from the ground up: first, by unearthing a new reading of the Lacanian category of the real; second, by demonstrating the political and cultural ingenuity of Lacan's concept of the real, and by positioning this against the more reductive analyses of the concept by Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Saul Newman, Todd May, Joan Copjec, Jacques Rancière, and others, and; third, by arguing that the subject exists intimately within the real. Lacanian Realism is an imaginative and timely exploration of the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalysis and contemporary continental philosophy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781350003576
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	01/25/2018
Series:	Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Duane Rousselle is Assistant Professor of Social Theory in the Department of Social Sciences at the University of New Brunswick, Saint John, Canada. He also maintains a private practice in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Duane Rousselle is a Canadian sociological theorist, Lacanian psychoanalyst, Associate Dean of Research and Associate Professor at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. He is also Visiting Associate Professor at the University Colleges of Dublin, Ireland, and Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan.

Table of Contents

Preface to “Lacanian Realism”
Katerina Kolozova

Acknowledgements

List of Figures and Tables

Introduction

Part I: Metaphysics and Hysteria: A Clinical Overview

Chapter 1: Eisegesis of Hysteria in Lacan's Teaching
Chapter 2: The Phallus as Signifying Function
Chapter 3: From Signifying Function to the Thing Function
Chapter 4: The New Contradiction: Things and Subjects
Chapter 5: Non-Psychoanalysis: The New Hysterical Question

Part II: Politics and Obsession

Chapter 6: From Hysteria to Obsession: On the Question of Style
Chapter 7: The Question of Repetition or the Repetition of a Question
Chapter 8: From Obsession to Hysteria
Chapter 9: The Good Work of the Slave
Chapter 10: The Situation of Obsessional Politics
Chapter 11: The Knot of Rupture

Part III: Numbers and Things

Chapter 12: Making Things Count and Things Making Count
Chapter 13: The Coup de Force of 3
Chapter 14: Transcendental Barriers for Thinking Immanence; How to Make a Borromean Knot Out of a Single Piece of String

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Rousselle's efforts must be applauded and his originality celebrated, for he has brought together disciplines-philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis-that do not always make for intellectual bedfellows. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, and professionals.” —CHOICE

“Rousselle carefully constructs his argument about a 'first order real' that is distinct from the second order 'symbolic real' for which Lacan is better known. He thereby opens up a number of productive connections with recent developments in continental philosophy, such as the set-theoretical ontology of Alain Badiou and the anti-Correlational 'Speculative Realism' of his student, Quentin Meillassoux. To Rousselle's credit, at the same time to he keeps in view clinical questions relating to psychic structures, principally obsessional neurosis and hysteria.” —Colin Wright, Associate Professor of Critical Theory, University of Nottingham, UK

“Lacanian Realism is a timely theoretical intervention into a continental philosophical debate, passionately 'demanding the impossible' by positioning the Lacanian Real within three respective fields, namely, clinical and metaphysical thought, radical political theory, and mathematics... An important contribution to the fields of continental philosophy, Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminism, and posthumanism.” —Chyatat Supachalasai, Lecturer in Political Theory and International Relations, Suan Dusit University, Thailand

From the Publisher