This work traces the development of Lacan's thinking on the role of the mother in psychical formation. It shows that the mother occupies a key position in the Lacanian project, widely held to emphasize the paternal dimension of human subjectivity.

Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared belief that the boundaries between self and other had disappeared during the Great War helps explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts and literary works alike. The Self and Its Pleasures offers a pathbreaking understanding of the boundaries between theory and history.

Ethnic cleansing and other methods of political and social exclusion continue to thrive in our globalized world, complicating the idea that unity and diversity can exist in the same society. When we emphasize unity, we sacrifice heterogeneity, yet when we stress diversity, we create a plurality of individuals connected only by tenuous circumstance. As long as we remain tethered to these binaries, as long as we are unable to imagine the sort of society we want in an age of diversity, we cannot achieve an enduring solution to conflicts that continue unabated despite our increasing proximity to one another. By envisioning the public as a multivoiced body, Fred Evans offers a solution to the dilemma of diversity. The multivoiced body is both one and many: heterogeneous voices that at once separate and bind themselves together through their continuous and creative interplay. By focusing on this traditionally undervalued or overlooked notion of voice, Evans shows how we can valorize simultaneously the solidarity, diversity, and richness of society. Moreover, recognition of society as a multivoiced body helps resists the pervasive countertendency to raise a chosen discourse to the level of "one true God," "pure race," or some other "oracle" that eliminates the dynamism of contesting voices. To support these views, Evans taps the major figures and themes of analytic and continental philosophy as well as modernist, postmodernist, postcolonial, and feminist thought. He also turns to sources outside of philosophy to address the implications of his views for justice, citizenship, democracy, and collective as well as individual rights. Through the seemingly simple conceit of a multivoiced body, Evans straddles both philosophy and political practice, confronting issues of subjectivity, language, communication, and identity. For anyone interested in moving toward a just society and politics, The Multivoiced Body offers an innovative approach to the problems of human diversity and ethical plurality.

Cutting-edge philosophers, psychoanalysts, literary theorists, and scholars use Freud and Lacan to shed light on laughter, humor, and the comic. Bringing together clinic, theory, and scholarship this compilation of essays offers an original mix with powerful interpretive implications.

This collection of specially commissioned essays, first published in 2003, explores key dimensions of Lacan's life and works.

Amorous Acts uses psychoanalytic concepts to show how queer theory is operating to put in place a non-heterosexist social order.

Lacan was not an ahistorical post-structuralist. Starting from this controversial premiss, Teresa Brennan tells the story of a social psychosis. She begins by recovering Lacan's neglected theory of history which argued that we are in the grip of a psychotic's era which began in the seventeenth century and climaxes in the present. By extending and elaborating Lacan's theory, Brennan develops a general theory of modernity. Contrary to postmodern assumptions, she argues, we need general historical explanation. An understanding of historical dynamics is essential if we are to make the connections between the outstanding facts of modernity - ethnocentrism, the relationship between the sexes and ecological catastrophe.

"Investigates the major novels of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner through psychoanalytic theory and in the context of the legacy of the Counter-Enlightenment"--

David Brodsky uses form and source criticism to date Massekhet Kallah and the first two chapters of Kallah Rabbati - which form a commentary on Massekhet Kallah - to the mid-amoraic period (circa late third and early fifth centuries CE respectively), and to locate their redaction in Babylonia. This makes these two sources the only known rabbinic texts whose final redaction took place in Babylonia during the amoraic period, and establishes them as the closest extant relatives of the Babylonian Talmud. Parallels between these two sources and the Babylonian Talmud elucidate the nature of oral transmission and of the redactional processes of Babylonian rabbinic material during this critical period, and, thereby, of the Babylonian Talmud itself. In addition, the author deciphers Massekhet Kallah's peculiar asceticism: a concern with men's inappropriate use of or interactions with their wives, charity, vows, and even with the group's own transmitted traditions. Massekhet Kallah fears the physical and at times cosmic effects of such inappropriate behavior. Brodsky finds that these items were all deemed consecrated, removed from the realm of normal interaction. To have mundane interaction with them was a powerful and dangerous act. Brodsky explores the fascinating gender and theological implications of this unique asceticism.

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