In this fascinating new book, Rosalinda Quintieri addresses some of the key questions of visual theory concerning our unending fascination with simulacra by evaluating the recent return of the life-size doll in European and American visual culture. Through a focus on the contemporary photographic and cinematic forms of this figure and a critical mobilisation of its anthropological complexity, this book offers a new critical understanding of this classical aesthetic motif as a way to explore the relevance that doubling, fantasy and simulation hold in our contemporary culture. Quintieri explores the figure of the inanimate human double as an "inhuman partner", reflecting on contemporary visuality as the field of a hypermodern, post-Oedipal aesthetic. Through a series of case studies that blur traditional boundaries between practices (photography, performance, sculpture, painting, documentary) and between genres (comedy, drama, fairy tale), Quintieri puts in contrast the new function of the double and its plays of simulations on the background of the capitalist injunction to enjoy. Engaging with new theories on post-Oedipal forms of subjectivity developed within the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis, Quintieri offers exciting analyses of still and moving photographic work, giving body to an original aesthetic model that promises to revitalise our understanding of contemporary photography and visual culture. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and researchers from Lacanian psychoanalysis, visual studies and cultural theory, as well as readers with an academic interest in the cultural history of dolls and the theory of the uncanny.

This book takes a critical feminist approach to Lacan’s fundamental concepts, merging discourse and sexuation theories in a novel way for both psychoanalysis and feminism, and exploring the possibility of a feminist subject within a non-masculine logic. In Lacan and Critical Feminism, Carusi merges Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation, not only from a gender/sexuality angle, but also from a literary, feminist, and women’s studies framework. By drawing examples from literature, film, art, and socio-political movements to focus on discourse and sexuation, the text examines how tropes impact the subject’s positionality within any discourse mode. The book also uses women’s collective experience and action to illustrate ways that women have repositioned dominant narratives discursively. This text represents essential reading for researchers interested in the relationship between Lacan and feminist theory.

This book locates internally focused, critical perspectives regarding the social, political, emotional, and mental growth of children. Through the radical openness afforded by psychoanalytic and related frameworks, this volume illuminates, promotes, and helps situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society. The overall emphasis is on motifs of lostness and foundness, in terms of the geographies of the psycho-social, and how such motifs govern and regulate what have come to count as the normative indexes of childhood as well as how they exclude other real childhoods.

Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna shows how photography and film in turn-of-the-century Vienna (the birthplace of psychoanalysis) not only reflected modernist ideas already in force, but helped to bring into being what might be referred to as a “psychoanalytic imagination.” Mary Bergstein demonstrates that visual images not only illustrated, but also engendered ways of seeing social, psychological, and scientific ideas during a formative time in the creation and development of psychoanalysis and the modern age. Indeed, she argues that visual culture initiated significant aspects of psychoanalytic thought. Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna examines a variety of visual materials and texts, ranging from scientific illustrations to popular "low culture" and even forms of erotica, including film. Attention is also given to women's dresses and shoes in a social context and as they are represented in photography and circulated as fetish objects. Bergstein maintains a commitment to women's history and feminist inquiry throughout, particularly in her final chapter, which is devoted to the representations of women in the erotic photography and film. Visual Culture in Freud's Vienna is well illustrated with images drawn from the sources discussed and makes a significant contribution to our understanding of modernism and psychoanalysis.

This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, explores the impact of shifts in contemporary culture, politics and society on the notion of ‘perversion’, which has undergone numerous profound changes in recent years. The book explores a wide range of issues, from changes in the psychoanalytic clinic, to transformations in the relationship between ‘transgression’ and the law; from the epistemic and diagnostic status of ‘perversion’ as a term, to the perverse turn in contemporary politics; from representations of perversion in cultural productions, to the interpretation of perverse cultural practices. Topical and controversial, academics and students of psychoanalysis, critical and cultural theory, and media studies will find this collection invaluable. In providing cutting edge theoretical debate, the book will also be attractive to practising and training psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. /div

David Bate examines automatism and the photographic image, the Surrealist passion for insanity, ambivalent use of Orientalism, use of Sadean philosophy and the effect of fascism of the Surrealists. The book is illustrated wtih a wide range of surrealist photographs.

Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance. Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty. His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

"Examining the themes of presence and absence, the relationship between photography and theatre, history and death, these 'reflections on photography' begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind."--Alibris.

This is the first single-authored book in English on the photographer Claude Cahun, whose work was rediscovered in the 1980s. Doy moves beyond standard postmodern approaches, instead repositioning the artist, born Lucy Schwob, in the context of the turbulent times in which she lived and seeing the photographs as part of Cahun's wider life as an artist and writer, a woman and lesbian and as a political activist in the early twentieth century. Doy rethinks Cahun's approach to dress and masquerade, looking at the images in light of the situation of women at the time and within the prevailing 'beauty' culture. Addressing Cahun's ambivalent relationship with Symbolism and later relationship with Surrealism, this highly readable book also looks at Cahun's unusual approach to the domestic object.

This collection offers the first sustained, in-depth commentary on Seminar XX, Encore, considered the cornerstone of Lacan's work on the themes of sexual difference, knowledge, jouissance, and love. Although Seminar XX was originally popularized as Lacan's treatise on feminine sexuality, these essays, by some of today's foremost Lacanian scholars, go beyond feminine sexuality to address Lacan's significant intertwining concern with the rupture between reality and the real produced by modern science, and the implications of this rupture for subjectivity, knowledge, jouissance, and the body. The essays clarify basic concepts, but for readers already familiar with Lacan they also offer sophisticated workings-through of the more challenging and obscure arguments in Encore—both by tracing their historical development across Lacan's œuvre and by demonstrating their relation to particular philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific concepts. They cover much of the terrain necessary for understanding sexual difference—not in terms of chromosomes, body parts, choice of sexual partner, or varieties of sexual practice—but in terms of one's position vis-à-vis the Other and the kind of jouissance one is able to obtain. In so doing, they make significant interventions in the debates regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in feminist theory, philosophy, queer theory, and cultural studies.