This book takes a critical feminist approach to Lacan’s fundamental concepts, merging discourse and sexuation theories in a novel way for both psychoanalysis and feminism, and exploring the possibility of a feminist subject within a non-masculine logic.
This book takes a critical feminist approach to Lacan’s fundamental concepts, merging discourse and sexuation theories in a novel way for both psychoanalysis and feminism, and exploring the possibility of a feminist subject within a non-masculine logic.
In Lacan and Critical Feminism, Carusi merges Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation, not only from a gender/sexuality angle, but also from a literary, feminist, and women’s studies framework. By drawing examples from literature, film, art, and socio-political movements to focus on discourse and sexuation, the text examines how tropes impact the subject’s positionality within any discourse mode. The book also uses women’s collective experience and action to illustrate ways that women have repositioned dominant narratives discursively.
Author(s): Rahna McKey Carusi
Series: The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis Series
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2020
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
A literary and critical approach to psychoanalysis
The book’s trajectory
Notes
2 A (re)turn to Lacan
Discourse, psychoanalytically speaking (or, discourse and the directionality of the subject)
The four discourses
The hysteric’s discourse
The hysteric and the feminine
Discourse and sexuation
Notes
Quilting point
A literary discussion on metaphor and metonymy
3 The troped body
The hysterical symptom and its inscription on the body
Metaphor, always behind the throne of metonymy
Metonymy, the articulation of desire
The gaze and the L schema
Notes
4 The materiality of the letter
The materiality of the letter
Affect: shame and guilt
Shame, the “feminine” position, and the letter
The paradigmatic queen
The letter conflated with Woman
Woman does not exist, but neither, perhaps, does the phallus
Notes
Quilting point
I AM A MAN and the essence of Woman
5 Woman as metonymy: Or, I am not your manqué l’être
Woman as metonymy
Contiguity and refiguration: Irigaray and her critics
Speaking as Woman: the discursive limitations of enjoyment and the discursive enjoyment of limitations
A metonymic disfiguration of masculinist syntax
Notes
Quilting point
The masculine symptom in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
6 Jouissance and ethical extimacy
The monstrous Woman: symbolic failure in Antichrist
Woman and extimacy
A psychoanalytic feminism does not need a penis-phallus relation
Notes
7 Myth, truth, and non-phallic sexuation
Lacan’s sexuation graph
The sexuation graph’s lower quadrants
The first revolution: towards a discursive signification of desire’s metonymy
Notes
Quilting point
Tapping into excess, or the feminist trilogies
8 The dethroning of the father
An ethics of the hysteric’s discourse and the labor of desire
S1 replaces . in the sexuation graph
Beyond masculinist logic
Notes
Works cited
Index
