Quintessentially fascinating, love intrigues and perplexes us, and drives much of what we do in life. As wary as we may be of its illusions and disappointments, many of us fall blindly into its traps and become ensnared time and again. Deliriously mad excitement turns to disenchantment, if not deadening repetition, and we wonder how we shall ever break out of this vicious cycle.Can psychoanalysis – with ample assistance from philosophers, poets, novelists, and songwriters – give us a new perspective on the wellsprings and course of love? Can it help us fathom how and why we are often looking for love in all the wrong places, and are fundamentally confused about “what love really is”?In this lively and wide-ranging exploration of love throughout the ages, Fink argues that it can. Taking within his compass a vast array of traditions – from Antiquity to the courtly love poets, Christian love, and Romanticism – and providing an in-depth examination of Freud and Lacan on love and libido, Fink unpacks Lacan’s paradoxical claim that “love is giving what you don’t have.” He shows how the emptiness or lack we feel within ourselves gets covered over or entwined in love, and how it is possible and indeed vital to give something to another that we feel we ourselves don’t have.This first-ever commentary on Lacan’s Seminar VIII, Transference, provides readers with a clear and systematic introduction to Lacan’s views on love. It will be of great value to students and scholars of psychology and of the humanities generally, and to analysts of all persuasions.
Hello, Lara Welcome to the world of books. This colorful, personalized keepsake is just for you. In Lara s Reading Log, your family and friends will be able to record the first 200 books you read and prepare you for a lifetime of reading, achievement, and success. Sprinkled with great advice and inspiration, this memory book will remind you throughout your life of those books and people who inspired you. A note for adults: recording a child s first books creates a mindset of reading the first steps to a lifetime of learning and growth."
Hello, Layan Welcome to the world of books. This colorful, personalized keepsake is just for you. In Layan s Reading Log, your family and friends will be able to record the first 200 books you read and prepare you for a lifetime of reading, achievement, and success. Sprinkled with great advice and inspiration, this memory book will remind you throughout your life of those books and people who inspired you. A note for adults: recording a child s first books creates a mindset of reading the first steps to a lifetime of learning and growth."
Hello, Lara Welcome to the world of books. This colorful, personalized keepsake is just for you. In Lara s Reading Log, your family and friends will be able to record the first 200 books you read and prepare you for a lifetime of reading, achievement, and success. Sprinkled with great advice and inspiration, this memory book will remind you throughout your life of those books and people who inspired you. A note for adults: recording a child s first books creates a mindset of reading the first steps to a lifetime of learning and growth."
Hello, Layan Welcome to the world of books. This colorful, personalized keepsake is just for you. In Layan s Reading Log, your family and friends will be able to record the first 200 books you read and prepare you for a lifetime of reading, achievement, and success. Sprinkled with great advice and inspiration, this memory book will remind you throughout your life of those books and people who inspired you. A note for adults: recording a child s first books creates a mindset of reading the first steps to a lifetime of learning and growth."
Broadly speaking, the majority of books on Jacques Lacan focus on the earlier periods of his career. They also tend to target the psychoanalytic clinical community, or else discuss his work in various political, social, and cultural contexts. But in almost all cases these books refrain from a detailed exegesis of his actual texts. They instead prefer to comment on his theoretical apparatus as a whole before turning to its practical implications.Lacan and Meaning positions itself against this grain. Firstly, it closely analyzes some half-dozen key Lacanian texts. This analysis is organized under a single thematic - the question of meaning - in order to advance the reader's understanding of the trajectory of Lacan's thought across his entire career, as well as to promote the book's thesis that the field of meaning can be suspended. Accordingly, an initial chapter takes up the hermeneutical tradition from Flacius onward. This is then supplemented by a chapter which surveys phenomenological, structuralist and aesthetic theories of meaning and their differing methods of textual analysis. Together these two chapters provide a unique context for the sustained analysis of Lacan's texts which begins in the third chapter, an analysis that forms the bulk of the book's content. This contextualization potentially widens the book's appeal to any scholar wishing to explore his relationship to those textual objects he interacts with on a daily basis. And because this book assumes the reader has little to no familiarity with Lacan, the reader will find patient explanations of the basics of his theories before slowly being led up to the more difficult theories of his late years. Again the argument is that Lacan has something to offer all scholars. His work is not just reserved for psychoanalysts.It is with his late theories that the serious student of Lacan will find the book's most original contribution. For in the fourth chapter a detailed account is provided of how Lacan derived his infamous formulae of sexuation from Aristotelian logic. These formulae are then extensively discussed against the backdrop of interpretive theory and textual analysis, showing how these formulae capture much more than just the difference between the sexes. Strikingly, this difference is also found to run through meaning itself, something the final chapter aims to demonstrate. It does this by amalgamating three key components of late-Lacan: sexuation, discourse theory and his use of topological spaces. This amalgamation is a first in the literature. But this amalgamation is not just useful in demonstrating the book's thesis. It further suggests how seemingly divergent aspects of late-Lacanian theory can be made to work together.From the back cover: What is the essential nature of meaning?This book answers by examining interpretive theories from the past and present. It finds that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation, a struggle that reaches crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand, this crisis is mollified by Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which argues that we are always already in a meaningful relationship to the objects of the world. On the other hand, this crisis is exacerbated when phenomenology, structuralism, and aesthetic theory directly make meaning into an object of study.These historical developments culminate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose non-hermeneutical phenomenology delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Intriguingly, Lacan's work reveals meaning to be sexual in nature. By integrating his notion of sexual difference with his work in discourse theory and topology, this book demonstrates how the subject's struggle with meaning can be suspended.William J. Urban holds a PhD in Humanities from York University.
