Lacan and Psychoanalytic Obsolescence

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania

This delightful, sparkling book is both a scholarly exploration of themes and encounters in the history of psychoanalysis and also a suggestive and stimulating study of psychoanalytic concepts. Rabaté turns the subject matter of these essays into prisms which allow broader problems and traditions to come into focus, from the question of translation for Freud and Lacan to the context of 'Kant with Sade' and the place of affects in psychoanalytic thinking. Rabaté's fluid, effortless prose, together with his well-known erudition, make this a pleasure to read.Darian Leader, psychoanalyst and author (London). Life irritates. It stings. Offends. Aggravates. Draws blood. But what irritates the most today is language—nine billion others speaking, posting, writing, chattering. Take a wild trip with Jean-Michel Rabaté and Lacan, who show us how irritation can be an invitation to liveliness rather than cruelty. Jamieson Webster, psychoanalyst and author (New York).Using the experience of irritation as an index of discursive renewal, this wide-ranging yet tightly constructed book offers the reader countless new insights into some of the most intractable quandaries that have beset Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis. From age-old irritants such as the Freudian death drive to Lacan’s woefully irritating claim that he was a born poem, Rabaté demonstrates magnificently how the discomfort that psychoanalysis and its most uncompromising proponents elicit is the true measure of its ongoing relevance. Where complacency was, there irritation shall be!Dany Nobus, professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology, Brunel University (London).

• Introduction. Irritations 1. Psychoanalysis as Irritant Translation 2. Freud's Irritations 3. Affects and their vicissitudes 4. Cruor, or the Cruel Fiction of Psychoanalysis 5. Irritating Kant with Sade, Irritating Sade with Kant 6. Lacan's Quarrel with Nancy and Posthumous Victory 7. "Perpetual Translation Made Language": Lacan's response to Deconstruction in "Lituraterre." Conclusion. "I am a poem, not a poet": Lacan's Autopoiesis