Richard Feldstein – författare

This book provides the first truly sustained commentary to appear in either French or English on Lacan's most important seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The 16 contributors unpack Lacan's notoriously difficult work in simple terms, and supply elegant illustrations from a variety of fields: psychoanalytic treatment, film, literature, art, and so on. Each of Lacan's fundamental concepts—the unconscious, transference, drive, and repetition—is discussed in detail, and related to other important notions such as object a cause of desire, the gaze, the Name-of-the-Father, the subject, and the Other. This volume also includes a translation of Lacan's companion piece to Seminar XI, "Position of the Unconscious" (an article from the French edition of the Ecrits that has never before appeared in English), by one of the foremost translators of Lacan's work, Bruce Fink. As an indication of the important of this article, Lacan considered it to be the sequel to his "Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," arguably his most important paper in the 1950s.The contributors include many of the best minds in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today. Chapters include "Excommunication: Context and Concepts" by Jacques-Alain Miller, "The Subject and the Other I and II" by Colette Soler, "Alienation and Separation I and II" by Eric Laurent, "Science and Psychoanalysis" by Bruce Fink, "The Name-of-the-Father" by Francois Regnault, "Transference as Deception" by Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, "The Drive I and II" by Marie-Helène Brousse, "The Demontage of the Drive" by Maire Jaanus, "The Gaze as an Object" by Antonio Quinet, "The Phallic Gaze of Wonderland" by Richard Feldstein, "The 'Evil Eye' of Painting: Jacques Lacan and Witold Gombrowicz on the Gaze" by Hanjo Berressem, "Art and the Position of the Analyst" by Robert Samuels, "The Relation between Voice and the Gaze" by Ellie Ragland, "The Lamella of David Lynch" by Slavoj Zizek, "The Real Cause of Repetition" by Bruce Fink, "Introductory Talk at Sainte-Anne Hospital" by Jacques-Alain Miller, and "The End of Analysis I and II" by Anne Dunand.

In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. These essays, by some of the finest analysts and writers in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today, carefully lay out the background and development of Lacan's thought. In Part I, Jacques-Alain Miller spells out the philosophical and psychiatric origins of Lacan's work in great detail. In Parts II, III, and IV, Colette Soler, Eric Laurent, and others explain in the clearest of fashions the highly influential conceptualization Lacan introduces with the terms "symbolic," "imaginary," and "real." Part V provides the first sustained account in English to date of Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalytic diagnostic categories—neurosis, perversion, psychosis, and their subcategories—their theoretical foundations, and clinical applications (ample case material is provided here.)Parts VI and VII of this collection take us well beyond Seminars I and II, relating Lacan's early work to his later views of the 1960s and 1970s. Slavoj Zizek explores the complex philosophical relations between Hegel and Lacan regarding the subject and the cause. And Lacan's article, "On Freud's 'Trieb' and the Psychoanalyst's Desire"—that appears here for the first time in English and is brilliantly unpacked by Jacques-Alain Miller in his "Commentary on Lacan's Text"—takes a giant step forward to 1965 where we see a crucial reversal in Lacan's perspective: desire is suddenly devalued, the defensive, inhibiting nature of desire coming to the fore. "What then becomes essential is the drive as an activity related to the lost object that produces jouissance."

A hard-hitting assessment of the way the Right has used this divisive issue.If our so-called culture war seems all on the side of the Right, there’s a reason. It’s all in their heads. From the beleaguered-some would say baffled-silence on the Left, this book at long last emerges with a devastating diagnosis of the “debate” over political correctness. Written with refreshing clarity and wit, Political Correctness describes a cultural nonphenomenon brought into being by the desires of neoconservatives. Nostalgic for the simple moral logic of the Cold War, the conservative Right has created an evil empire within and conferred upon its enemies-from multiculturalists to postmodernists and poststructuralists-a McCarthyite agenda that demands action from the high-minded. What clearly marks this as a projection, Richard Feldstein points out, is the moralism attributed to the forces of political correctness by their conservative critics. And where, in fact, do we find the obsessive fixation on judgment, morality, and correct and appropriate behavior that might make political correctness so reprehensible? It is, Feldstein argues, a central feature of right-wing thinking, projected onto those who reject such black-and-white, good-and-bad views as naive. Political Correctness defines this procedure in comparison with the process of psychological projection, in which consciousness transfers onto others what it cannot tolerate. In the case of cultural projection, Feldstein says, the transference is often intentional. In readings of key neoconservative texts, Feldstein shows how this approach got its initial boost with the ascension of Reagan and the Moral Majority, continued as the dominant form of Republicanism in the Bush-Quayle era, and persists during the Clinton administration. Political Correctness is not just an essential tool to understanding the way the Right deploys this powerful weapon; it is a guide to resisting the cynical use of these tactics in our media-saturated society, one that acknowledges the complexity of life in our multicultural, postmodern world.

Originally published in 1990, Psychoanalysis and… brings together essays by critics whose work demonstrates the lively interpenetration of psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Andrew Ross investigates psychoanalysis and Marxist thought; Joel Fineman reads the "sound of O" in Othello; Jane Gallop asks "Why does Freud giggle when the women leave the room?"; and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan examines Lacan’s seminars on James Joyce. This stimulating collection of work should still be required reading, especially for students of literature. But Psychoanalysis and… demonstrates that psychoanalysis – and theoretical criticism, and feminism, and Lacanian theory, and semiotics, and Marxism, and deconstruction, and literary criticism – was, at the time, a rich and expanding terrain.

Originally published in 1990, Psychoanalysis and… brings together essays by critics whose work demonstrates the lively interpenetration of psychoanalysis and other disciplines. Andrew Ross investigates psychoanalysis and Marxist thought; Joel Fineman reads the "sound of O" in Othello; Jane Gallop asks "Why does Freud giggle when the women leave the room?"; and Ellie Ragland-Sullivan examines Lacan’s seminars on James Joyce. This stimulating collection of work should still be required reading, especially for students of literature. But Psychoanalysis and… demonstrates that psychoanalysis – and theoretical criticism, and feminism, and Lacanian theory, and semiotics, and Marxism, and deconstruction, and literary criticism – was, at the time, a rich and expanding terrain.

An anthology of psychoanalytic criticism applied to the wider field of cultural studies including class, gender, representation, ideology, and lawIn this volume, psychoanalysts, cultural theorists, and literary critics demonstrate the relevance of the unconscious economy to the field of cultural studies, applying psychoanalytic criticism to political and aesthetic issues related to the legal and ideological superstructure of contemporary society.These writers have adopted a variety of rhetorical positions when engaging cultural issues that deal with representation, ideology, class, and gender. Contributors include Willy Apollon, Richard Feldstein, Slavoj Zizek, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Judith Roof, Ellie Ragland, Elizabeth J. Bellamy, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus, Elizabeth Bronfen, Hanjo Berressem, Peter Widmer, Danielle Bergeron, Lucie Cantin, and Catherine Portuges.

Addresses Lacan's reception in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, offering new perspectives for American readers.This book offers a selection of the best work on Lacan that has been published over the past ten years by RISS, a Swiss journal of Lacanian studies. Though focused on Lacan and Freud, the collection is partly about Germany itself, addressing questions of trauma, historical memory, politics, fascism, and democracy. The essays range from investigations of particular art forms such as music and tragedy to clinical studies of melancholia, depression, anxiety, and other somatic phenomena that have a symbolic or psychic dimension. As a whole, the book explores the breakdown of meaning and the failure of social and political structures, which Lacan addresses through the category of the Real, and it offers English-speaking readers a variety of new perspectives on Lacan and psychoanalysis.