Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism

Thomas Waller is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin, Ireland. He has published widely in journals such as Textual Practice, Rethinking Marxism, Modern Fiction Studies, and Qui Parle. His monograph Genres of Transition: Literature and Economy in Portuguese-Speaking Southern Africa is forthcoming in 2024. He is an Associate Editor at CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture.Sinan Richards is a Lecturer in French at University College Cork, Ireland. He is the author of Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan (2023), co-editor, alongside Christina Howells, of Michel Serres: ecology, parasitism and the (post)human, a Special Issue of the Modern & Contemporary France Journal 2024, and Fanon and Lacan: Decolonial Psychoanalysis, alongside Derek Hook (forthcoming). Richards serves as a member of the French Studies editorial board and is a correspondent, associate, and referee at the European Journal of Psychoanalysis. He is currently finalizing a book on Fanon and Lacan.

This fine collection places the enigmatic but indispensable Lacan in his truest context—that of 20th-century modernist art and thought. These essays elucidate what makes Lacan our most sophisticated psychologist: his avant-gardism, his appreciation of the limit situations of human knowledge and existence, and his recognition of paradox as the mark of truth.

• Introduction: Misunderstanding LacanThomas Waller, University College Dublin, Ireland, and Sinan Richards, University College Cork, IrelandPart I. Conceptualizing Lacan1. Lacan: Avant-garde psychiatristDerek Hook, Duquesne University, USA, and Stijn Vanheule, Ghent University, Belgium2. Lacan's "New Relay": Salvador Dalí and René CrevelSinan Richards, University College Cork, Ireland3. Modernity and the Impotence of DiscourseNadia Bou Ali, American University in Beirut, Lebanon4. Subjective Destitution as GiftElizabeth Stewart, Yeshiva University, USA5. Psychoanalysis in Search of Itself: Jacques Lacan, T.S. Eliot, and the Seductions of ModernismMario Beira, Independent Scholar, and Dany Nobus, Brunel University London, UK6. From Irma to Joyce to Beckett: On Lacan's Crisis of RepresentationWill Greenshields, Zhejiang University, China7. Lituraterre: How Lacan Literalizes LiteratureJean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, USAPart II. Lacan and Aesthetics8. Navel-Gazing: Mário de Sá-Carneiro and Confessional DesireThomas Waller, University College Dublin, Ireland9. Thinking Again about the End: Kafka, Lacan, and BenjaminBen Ware, King's College London, UK10. Bachmann's Malaise and the Language of HysteriaJamieson Webster, The New School for Social Research, USA, and Marcus Coelen, ICI Berlin, Germany11. Ret-Con Jouissance: Salman Rushdie and Postcolonial ModernismClint Burnham, Simon Frasier University, Canada12. The Tripwire of Modernism: Hunger as Function and OrnamentSimon Hajdini, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia13. Fixing Repetition: Lacan, Beckett, and the Exhaustive Obsession of CountingArka Chattopadhyay, IIT Gandhinagar, India14. Queer Company: Henry James and GhostsLuke Thurston, Aberystwyth University, UK Part III. Glossary15. CutThomas Waller, University College Dublin, Ireland16. EthicsThomas Waller, University College Dublin, Ireland17. FantasyCalum Neill, Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland18. GazeThomas Waller, University College Dublin, Ireland19. LetterThomas Waller, University College Dublin, Ireland20. Object aNicholas Stock, University of Birmingham, UK21. PsychosisStijn Vanheule, Ghent University, Belgium22. R. S. I.Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania, USA23. SexuationThomas Waller, University College Dublin, IrelandNotes on ContributorsIndex