How to Read Lacan - Softcover

Zizek, Slavoj

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393329550 ISBN 13: 9780393329551

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007

Synopsis

“The only thing of which one can be guilty of is having given ground relative to one’s desire.”―Jacques Lacan

The How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon. These books use excerpts from the major texts to explain essential topics, such as Jacques Lacan's core ideas about enjoyment, which re-created our concept of psychoanalysis.

Lacan’s motto of the ethics of psychoanalysis involves a profound paradox. Traditionally, psychoanalysis was expected to allow the patient to overcome the obstacles which prevented access to "normal" sexual enjoyment; today, however, we are bombarded by different versions of the injunction "Enjoy!" Psychoanalysis is the only discourse in which you are allowed not to enjoy.

Slavoj Žižek’s passionate defense of Lacan reasserts Lacan’s ethical urgency. For Lacan, psychoanalysis is a procedure of reading and each chapter reads a passage from Lacan as a tool to interpret another text from philosophy, art or popular ideology.

About this title

About the Author:

Slavoj Žižek, philosopher and psychoanalyst, heads the International Center of Humanities at Birkbeck College. His numerous books, translated into more than thirty languages, include The Parallax View and Lacan: The Silent Partners.

Simon Critchley is a best-selling author and the Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research. His books include Very Little...Almost Nothing, Infinitely Demanding, The Book of Dead Philosophers, The Faith of the Faithless, Bowie, Memory Theatre and Suicide.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0393329550
• ISBN 13: 9780393329551
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144