Lacan and Critical Feminism: Subjectivity, Sexuation, and Discourse (The Lines of the Symbolic in Psychoanalysis)

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. 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 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. This text represents essential reading for researchers interested in the relationship between Lacan and feminist theory.