Lacan and the Nonhuman

Beschreibung

This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic – the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject (as distinct from the human) in current critical investigations of a nonanthropoentric universe. In doing so they unravel a less-than-human theory of the subject; explore implications of Lacanian teachings in relation to the environment, freedom, and biopolitics; and investigate the subjective enjoyments of and anxieties over nonhumans in literature, film, and digital media. This innovative volume fills a valuable gap in the literature, extending investigations into an important and topical strand of the social sciences for both analytic and pedagogical purposes.

This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic – the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject (as distinct from the human) in current critical investigations of a nonanthropoentric universe. In doing so they unravel a less-than-human theory of the subject; explore implications of Lacanian teachings in relation to the environment, freedom, and biopolitics; and investigate the subjective enjoyments of and anxieties over nonhumans in literature, film, and digital media. This innovative volume fills a valuable gap in the literature, extending investigations into an important and topical strand of the social sciences for both analytic and pedagogical purposes.

Autor*in

Gautam Basu Thakur

Themen in »Lacan and the Nonhuman«

Freud psychoanalysis humanism the Other Jacques Lacan phobia and Freud Giorgio Agamben ethics of psychoanalysis post-humanist freedom George Spencer-Brown’s calculus of indications Samuel Beckett postmodernism YouTube ASMR videos psychology arithmocentrism

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“Thakur (English, Boise State Univ.), and Dickstein (independent scholar) have collected essays which integrate a neglected discourse between the recent ‘nonhuman turn’ in the humanities and psychoanalysis … . This new, original angle is lively with possibilities. … The book is suited to faculty and advanced students of philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis (especially Lacanian), and the history of ideas. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, and professionals.” (R. H. Balsam, Choice, Vol. 56 (5), January, 2019)
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“The idea of theoretical antihumanism and of an inhuman subject played an important role in contemporary French thought, from Lacan to Badiou. Lately, cognitive sciences proposed another version of antiumanism: the idea that we are entering a posthuman era. In this way, posthumanism is no longer a theoretical proposal but a matter of our daily lives. Can these two aspects be brought together? Lacan and the Nonhuman deals with this topic, and this is why it is an epoch-making book whose potentials are explosive - both sides lose their innocence. Nothing will be the same after this book.” (Slavoj Žižek)

“One could argue that Lacan has from the beginning of his teaching gestured to the “nonhuman” with his conception of language as structure, that language, as Maire Jaanus explains, “has nothing ‘human’ about it.  Signifiers are dead.”  In this strikingly original and provocative collection of essays by established and new scholars, the current “nonhuman turn” in the humanities is explored through a Lacanian orientation.  The collection rewards both new readers of Lacan as well as experienced readers of Lacan and importantly engages some of Lacan’s later seminars which have been woefully under-engaged in the U.S. for too many years.  Readers will be startled by the new angles of vision that Lacan’s early and later work opens up in the “non-anthropocentric humanities.” (Antonio Viego, Duke University, USA and author of Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies)

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