Lacanian Realism: Political and Clinical Psychoanalysis

Description

Lacanian theorists and philosophers have had to formulate responses to the volatile branch of philosophy known as speculative realism. Alain Badiou has claimed that Quentin Meillassoux's book After Finitude (Bloomsbury, 2008) "opened up a new path in the history of philosophy." Thus, it became possible to pursue an investigation into the metaphysical category of the real outside of its determinative symbolic and imaginary correlates. For their part, Lacanians have responded by reaffirming orthodoxy. For them, the real is always embedded within the wider trinity of the symbolic and imaginary. Lacanian Realism sets the record straight. 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 Zizek, Alain Badiou, Saul Newman, Todd May, Joan Copjec, Jacques Ranciere, and others, and; third, by arguing that the subject exists intimately within the real.

Duane Rousselle is a professor at the Global Center for Advanced Studies, New York, USA.

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 *