Knots Post-Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory Series

This collection of specially commissioned essays offers a wide array of new psychoanalytic approaches impacted by Lacanian theory, queer studies, post-colonial studies, feminism, and deconstruction in the domains of film and literature. We have witnessed a remarkable return to psychoanalysis in those fields, fields from which it had been excluded or discredited for a while. This has changed recently, and we need to understand why.

The fourteen essays make use a freshly minted psychoanalytic concepts to read diverse texts, films and social practices. The distinguished authors gathered here, an international group of scholars coming from Japan, China, Korea, India, Belgium, Greece, France, Australia, and the USA, are all cognizant of the advances of theory under the form of deconstruction, feminism, post-colonial studies and trauma studies.

These essays take into account the latest developments in Lacanian theory and never bracket off subjective agency when dealing with literature or film. The authors make sense of changes brought to psychoanalytical theory by redefinitions of the Oedipus complex, reconsiderations of the death drive, applications of Lacan?s symptom and the concept of the Real, reassessments of the links between affect and trauma, insights into the resilience of Romantic excess and jouissance, awareness of the role of transference in classical and modernist texts, and pedagogical techniques aimed at teaching difficult texts, all the while testifying to the influence on Lacanian theory of thinkers like Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes, Melanie Klein, Didier Anzieu, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003002727

Editor’s Introduction by Jean-Michel Rabaté: "Ampersands"

I. PSYCHOANALYSIS, TEXT,AND THE EMPLOTMENT OF SUBJECTIVITY

1. Isabelle Alfandary: "The Temptation of the Plot in Freud’s Early Case Studies."
2. Anna Kornbluh: "Freeing Impersonality: the objective subject in psychoanalysis and Sense & Sensibility."
3. David Sigler: "Lacan’s Romanticism."
4. Astrid Lac: "Trauma theory, or Literature’s Will to Power."
5. Fuhito Endo: "Queering the death drive in Joseph Conrad."
6. Annelein Masschelein: "Why Didier Anzieu Now? Stretching the Shared Skin of the Work of Art."
7. Ruth Gounelas: "What Does the Poem Do? Literature and Psychoanalysis after Badiou."

II. READING NARRATIVES WITH REVISED CONCEPTS

8. Kazuyuki Hara: "Deconstructing the Oedipus Complex: Ôe and Murakami on the way to global culture."
9. Trent Ludwig: "Phantom Thread: Threading Between Dresses and Debts."
10. Sigi Jöttkandt: "Signs and Symbols, or the Nabokovian Unconscious."
11. Laurent Milesi: « Cybergo Sum: Auto-fiction vs. Psychoanalysis.»
12. Elizabeth Stewart: "Literature and the social bond."
13. Arka Chattopadhyay: "How to Mourn the Present: Fiction, Memory and Mourning."
14. Manya Steinkoler: "Teaching Degree Zero: Impossible Texts Inventing Subjectivities in the Classroom."

Jean-Michel Rabaté is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania and fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.