Wrestling with the Angel

Tracy McNulty is professor of French and comparative literature at Cornell University and the author of The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity.

A stellar piece of scholarship whose timely intervention into controversies at the very heart of today's theoretical humanities undoubtedly will draw the admiring attention of large audiences in multiple fields. -- Adrian Johnston, University of New Mexico A very exciting book, stunningly intelligent and beautifully written. It makes strong, original interventions in a number of current debates and engages with theoretical arguments in a way that is always rigorous and wonderfully lucid and accessible. -- Elizabeth Weed, Brown University. Co-editor, differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies In Wrestling with the Angel, Tracy McNulty examines the political theologies of the 'exception,' ranging from Carl Schmitt to Walter Benjamin, from Alain Badiou to Giorgio Agamben. She shows how they contradict themselves if they avoid grappling with the Symbolic order. Arguing that the force of the Symbolic must be experienced concretely via positive constraints, McNulty pushes Lacanian theory to an unprecedented sophistication and highlights its relevance for ethical activism. Wrestling with the Angel is a major book that redefines the foundations of contemporary political theory. -- Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania This provocative and original defense of law and the symbolic order in psychoanalysis is distinguished by McNulty's attention to clinical work, her supple readings of both Freudian and literary texts, and the trenchant case she makes for the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to the practice of human freedom, action, and creativity today. McNulty's command of the notoriously complex and difficult Lacanian corpus is matched by the fluency of her engagement with adjoining and competing discourses, including political theology; experimental poetics and aesthetics; political theory and critical legal studies; and religious studies and the legacy of Judaism. Arguing that novelty, invention, and renewal occur not despite but because of processes of symbolization, Wrestling with the Angel recalls us to our limits to remind us of our capacities. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life In Wrestling with the Angel, McNulty shows how the traditional reduction of Lacan's symbolic register to the Oedipus complex falsifies the complexity and disturbing incompleteness inherent to this crucial aspect of his theory. Her insight opens the way for a fundamental reassessment and reunderstanding of Lacan's work, and is, by itself, worth the price of admission. But she goes much farther, tracing out the implications of her rereading on a series of social thinkers, notably the influential conservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the French Marxist philosopher, Alain Badiou. With the exception of Carl Schmitt, these analyses revolve around two principal collections of seminal legal texts: the Hebrew Decalogue and Saint Paul's discussions of the "new law" of Christianity. Essentially, she argues that in each case an imaginary version of the law is juxtaposed to a more complex and "liberatory" symbolic version of it. Rich, densely thought, and provocative, this book will reorient studies on Lacan and will excercise an enduring influence on how his writings are used in other fields and disciplines. -- Jonathan Strauss, Miami University As a reading of the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan, the book makes an invaluable contribution to the rich discussion of the symbolic register and its relation to the real. CHOICE

• Acknowledgments Introduction: Enabling Constraints Part 1. Reinventing the Symbolic 1. Inventions of the Symbolic: Lacan's Reading of Freud 2. Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change Part 2. Political Theology and the Question of the Written 3. Wrestling with the Angel 4. The Gap in the Law and the Unwritable Act of Decision: Carl Schmitt's Political Theology 5. The Event of the Letter: Two Approaches to the Law and Its Real 6. The Commandment Against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment Coda: Toward an Aesthetics of Symbolic Life 7. Freedom Through Constraints: On the Question of Will Notes Index