The Castration of Oedipus

by Smith, J. C.; Ferstman, Carla; Scales, Ann

• ISBN13: 9780814780190
• ISBN10: 0814780199
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-04-01
• Publisher: New York Univ Pr

Summary

Whether you agree with Smith and Ferstman or not, this book will provoke you to think. And that may be its biggest contribution after all.--Professor Stephen TaubeneckUniversity of British ColumbiaJ.C. Smith and Carla J. Ferstman have collaborated on a project that shamelessly completes the incomplete work of Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, and Derrida. They insist on a radical social, psychical, and political transformation of conventional feminism.--Professor Henry Kariel, Author of The Desperate Politics of PostmodernismThe intellectual movements of psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and feminism have redefined the ways in which we think about human experience. And yet, an integration of these movements has been elusive, if not impossible. In this landmark book, J.C. Smith and Carla J. Ferstman combine these disparate traditions to create a provocative, unified, and tightly woven perspective that transcends the misogyny implicit in much of Freudian psychoanalytic theory.The dialectics of domination and submission are central to Smith and Ferstman's argument. Men and women, they insist, must avoid the temptation to fetishize equality and recognize the roles of domination and submission in the human psyche, or, in Nietzsche's terms, the Will to Power. They argue that the unification of psychoanalysis, postmodernism, and feminism leads us to a shocking conclusion--that women and men cannot move beyond the suffering which so haunts the human condition, unless heterosexual men surrender the power that is causing their misery and affirm life by joyfully accepting domination by women. And women, conversely, must reaffirm their power by rejecting Oedipal genderization and embracing a liberating matriarchal consciousness and a matriphallic sexuality.A work of tremendous insight and extraordinary intellectual energy, The Castration of Oedipus will provoke strong reactions in all readers regardless of ideology.

Author Biography

Carla J. Ferstman is employed by the United Nations as a Human Rights Monitor in Rwanda.

Table of Contents

List of Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction	p. 1
Thinking the Unthinkable	p. 10
The Sexuality of Politics	p. 31
Knowledge and the Languaging Body	p. 52
The Dialectics	p. 80
The Dialectics of Fantasy	p. 113
The Dialectics of Signification	p. 142
The Dialectics of Desire	p. 171
Ariadne and Dionysus	p. 200
Medusa Depetrified	p. 232
Oedipus	p. 259
Notes	p. 287
Index	p. 305
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