Overview
- Responds to new speculations in the humanities including environmentalism, global and transnational studies, animal and animality studies and post- and trans- humanism(s)
- Inaugurates a constructive dialogue between critical treatments of Freudian-Lacanian theory and those of the concept of the nonhuman
- Engages in active interpretations of the terms human and nonhuman
Part of the book series: The Palgrave Lacan Series (PALS)
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Table of contents (13 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Definitions and Contexts
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Front Matter
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Applications
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“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)
“Lacan and the Nonhuman is a truly forceful, delightfully inspiring collection of essays. It does not simply add Lacan to the corpus of nonhuman studies, but gives to the notion of nonhuman a whole new twist, as well as a most engaging and productive philosophical edge.” (Alenka Zupančič, Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at The European Graduate School)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Gautam Basu Thakur is Associate Professor of English at Boise State University, USA where he teaches courses in critical theory, postcoloniality and globalization, and British Empire studies. His first book, Postcolonial Theory and Avatar, was published in 2015.
Jonathan Michael Dickstein is an independent scholar. He teaches literature and media studies and researches connections between psychoanalysis, mathematics, and narrative theory.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Lacan and the Nonhuman
Editors: Gautam Basu Thakur, Jonathan Michael Dickstein
Series Title: The Palgrave Lacan Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63817-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Behavioral Science and Psychology, Behavioral Science and Psychology (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-63816-4Published: 31 January 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87644-3Published: 06 June 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-63817-1Published: 22 January 2018
Series ISSN: 2946-4196
Series E-ISSN: 2946-420X
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 286
Number of Illustrations: 5 b/w illustrations
Topics: Self and Identity, Psychoanalysis, Ontology, Existentialism, Philosophy of the Social Sciences