This book proposes a taxonomy of jurisprudence and legal practice, based on the discourse theory of Jacques Lacan. In the anglophone academy, the positivist jurisprudence of H.L.A. Hart provides the most influential account of law. But just as positivism ignores the practice of law by lawyers, even within the academy, the majority of professors are also not pursuing Hart's positivist project. Rather, they are engaged in policy-oriented scholarship - that tries to explain law in terms of society's collective goals - or in doctrinal legal scholarship - that does not try to describe what law is, or to supply justifications for it - but which examines the 'internal' logic of law. Lacan's discourse theory has the power to differentiate the various roles of the practicing lawyer and the legal scholar. It is also able to explain the striking lack of communication between diverse schools of legal scholarship and between legal academia and the legal profession. Although extremely influential in Europe and South America, Lacanian theory remains largely unexplored (in the English-speaking world) outside of the field of comparative literature. In taking up the jurisprudential ramifications of Lacan's work, The Four Lacanian Discourses thus constitutes an original contribution to current theoretical and practical understandings of law.

In this classic work, eight crucial Lacanian ideas are explained through detailed exploration of the theoretical and/or practical context in which Lacan introduced them, the way in which they developed throughout his works, and the questions they were designed to answer. The book does not presuppose any familiarity with Lacanian theory on the part of the reader, nor a prior acquaintance with Lacan's Ecrits or seminars. Originally published in 1998, the ideas within are more relevant than ever and this newly reissued volume will prove invaluable to today's scholars of Lacanian thought.

This collection introduces and develops Lacanian thought concerning the relations among language, subjectivity, and society. Lacanian Theory of Discourse provides an account of how language both interacts with and constitutes structures of subjectivity, producing specific attitudes and behaviors as well as significant social effects.

This collection is the first extended interrogation in any language of Jacques Lacan's Seminar XVII. Originally delivered just after the Paris uprisings of May 1968, Seminar XVII marked a turning point in Lacan’s thought; it was both a step forward in the psychoanalytic debates and an important contribution to social and political issues. Collecting important analyses by many of the major Lacanian theorists and practitioners, this anthology is at once an introduction, critique, and extension of Lacan’s influential ideas. The contributors examine Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, his critique of the Oedipus complex and the superego, the role of primal affects in political life, and his prophetic grasp of twenty-first-century developments. They take up these issues in detail, illuminating the Lacanian concepts with in-depth discussions of shame and guilt, literature and intimacy, femininity, perversion, authority and revolt, and the discourse of marketing and political rhetoric. Topics of more specific psychoanalytic interest include the role of objet a, philosophy and psychoanalysis, the status of knowledge, and the relation between psychoanalytic practices and the modern university. Contributors. Geoff Boucher, Marie-Hélène Brousse, Justin Clemens, Mladen Dolar, Oliver Feltham, Russell Grigg, Pierre-Gilles Guéguen, Dominique Hecq, Dominiek Hoens, Éric Laurent, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Jacques-Alain Miller, Ellie Ragland, Matthew Sharpe, Paul Verhaeghe, Slavoj Žižek, Alenka Zupancic

Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is an introduction to the emerging field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis. It includes key papers that lay the foundations for this research, and worked examples from analysts working with a range of different texts. The editors Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar begin with an introduction which reviews the key themes in discourse analysis and the problems faced by researchers in that field of work including an overview of the development of discourse analysis in different disciplines (psychology, sociology, cultural studies and political and social theory). They also set out the conceptual and methodological principles of Lacan's work insofar as it applies to the field of discourse. Ian Parker and David Pavón-Cuéllar have divided the book into three main sections. The first section comprises previously published papers, some not yet available in English, which set out the foundations for 'Lacanian Discourse Analysis'. The chapters establish the first lines of research, and illustrate how Lacanian psychoanalysis is transformed into a distinctive approach to interpreting text when it is taken out of the clinical domain. The second and third parts of the book comprise commissioned papers in which leading researchers from across the social sciences, from the English-speaking world and from continental Europe and Latin America, show how Lacanian Discourse Analysis works in practice. Lacan, Discourse, Event: New Psychoanalytic Approaches to Textual Indeterminacy is intended to be a definitive volume bringing together writing from the leaders in the field of Lacanian Discourse Analysis working in the English-speaking world and in countries where Lacanian psychoanalysis is part of mainstream clinical practice and social theory. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts of different traditions, to post-graduate and undergraduate researchers in psycho-social studies, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology.

Revolutionary and innovative, Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

This book presents the radically new theory of subjectivity found in the work of Jacques Lacan. Against the tide of post-structuralist thinkers who announce "the death of the subject," Bruce Fink explores what it means to come into being as a subject where impersonal forces once reigned, subjectify the alien roll of the dice at the beginning of our universe, and make our own knotted web of our parents' desires that led them to bring us into this world. Lucidly guiding readers through the labyrinth of Lacanian theory--unpacking such central notions as the Other, object a, the unconscious as structures like a language, alienation and separation, the paternal metaphor, jouissance, and sexual difference--Fink demonstrates in-depth knowledge of Lacan's theoretical and clinical work. Indeed, this is the first book to appear in English that displays a firm grasp of both theory and practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the author being one of the only Americans to have undergone full training with Lacan's school in Paris. Fink Leads the reader step by step into Lacan's conceptual system to explain how one comes to be a subject--leading to psychosis. Presenting Lacan's theory in the context of his clinical preoccupations, Fink provides the most balanced, sophisticated, and penetrating view of Lacan's work to date--invaluable to the initiated and the uninitiated alike.

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and those of Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern disciplines—psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these modes of thinking only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede history to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan’s explanation of historical processes and generative principles. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that is “literate in desire,” and capable of interpreting what is unsaid in the manifold operations of culture.

This book discusses what Jacques Lacan's oeuvre contributes to our understanding of psychosis. Presenting a close reading of original texts, Stijn Vanheule proposes that Lacan's work on psychosis can best be framed in terms of four broad periods.

The author's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, have provoked intense controversies in French analytic circles, requiring as they do a radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud. This volume is based on a year's seminar, which is of particular importance because he was addressing a larger, less specialist audience than ever before, amongst whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted "to introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based", namely the unconscious, repetition, the transference and the drive. In re-defining these four concepts he explores the question that, as he puts it, moves from "Is psycho-analysis a science?" to "What is a science that includes psycho-analysis?"