After Lacan: Literature, Theory and Psychoanalysis in the Twenty-First Century

Description

This book draws on the distinct phases of Jacques Lacan's career to show his way of thinking in and beyond his lifetime. It is an examination of the past, present, and futures of psychoanalysis, as these are developed in the dimensions of language, literature, logic, philosophy, visual culture, identity and sexuality, and politics. The interdisciplinary approach of the volume allows it to work across clinical, sociological, philosophical, and literary fields to both add dimensions to the literary/critical reception of Lacan and enable the system of Lacanian psychoanalysis to have a wider conversation. Re-examining the fundamental concepts of Lacanian theory in its historical contexts through the topological structures he inaugurated, After Lacan makes innovative critical interventions in contemporary debates on racism, Islam, the Communist Party, poetry, new media, disability identity, and queer theory. It is a key resource for students, graduates and instructors of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and the works of Lacan.

Ankhi Mukherjee is Professor of English and World Literatures at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wadham College. She is the author of Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007) and What Is a Classic? Postcolonial Rewriting and Invention of the Canon (2014), which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in English Literature in 2015. She has edited A Concise Companion to Psychoanalysis, Literature, and Culture (2014, with Laura Marcus).

'We can see from the essays collected here, apres coup - as it were - that now, more than ever, we should look not to 'after' Lacan, nor only for a 'return' to Lacan, but instead, we should unearth the 'sense' of Lacan, and Mukherjee's collection is an excellent end to that new beginning.' Sinan Richards, French Studies