Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan
In this first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work, Nasio eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments.
Description
Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan is the first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work. Juan-David Nasio makes numerous theoretical advances and eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments. What is distinctive, in the end, about Nasio's treatment of Lacan's theory is the extent to which Lacan's fundamental concepts—the unconscious, jouissance, and the body—become the locus of the overturning or exceeding of the discrete boundaries of the individual. The recognition of the implications of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, then, brings the analyst to adopt what Nasio calls a "special listening. "
Juan-David Nasio is a psychoanalyst in Paris and former member of the École Freudienne of Jacques Lacan. He teaches at the University of Paris VII (Sorbonne) and is the director of the Séminaires Psychanalytiques de Paris, a major center for psychoanalytical training and the dissemination of psychoanalytical thought to nonspecialists. David Pettigrew is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Connecticut State University. François Raffoul is Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus. Pettigrew and Raffoul have cotranslated The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and coedited Disseminating Lacan, both published by SUNY Press.
Reviews
"Nasio's Five Lessons provides an incisive entry into the densities of Lacan's difficult discourse. Focusing on the two principles of the unconscious as 'structured like a language' and of jouissance as signifying that 'there is no sexual relation,' Nasio takes up Lacanian theory in a refreshingly nondogmatic way. The complex role of the signifier, the vexing status of the subject of the unconscious, and the enigmatic object a are illuminated in the context of fantasy and the body. This is a remarkable work, as pithy as it is profound. The translation by Pettigrew and Raffoul makes Nasio's text—and thus Lacan's Écrits—lucidly accessible. " — Edward S. Casey, State University of New York at Stony Brook