Lacan and the Matter of Origins

by Barzilai, Shuli

• ISBN13: 9780804733816
• ISBN10: 0804733813
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-12-01
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

Lacan and the Matter of Originstraces the development of Lacan's thinking about the role of the mother in psychical formation. It examines the conceptual struggle throughout his work over issues of maternal agency in relation to the constitution of human subjectivity, and the theoretical, historical, and autobiographical reasons for this struggle. Lacan is widely held to emphasize the paternal dimension of human subjectivity and the phallic signifier. This book demonstrates that the mother occupies a crucial position in the Lacanian project, even if the maternal relation is not systematically theorized. The maternal figure appears as a Cheshire Cat who fades away and reappears at different times. The book traces the major shifts in Lacan's understanding of the maternal within an intertextual framework that includes Augustine, Klein, Kojeve, and Rank. Pursuing in Lacan's writings the sometimes contradictory or unassimilable functions of the mother, the book closely tracks his variations on and departures from the Freudian definition of such concepts as primary identification, narcissism, castration, deferred action, and the death drive. Lacan's major contribution to twentieth-century thought emerges here in the context of his ostensibly loyal yet revisionist stance toward Freud as his major precursor in the psychoanalytic field. For those reading Lacan's often recondite work for the first time,Lacan and the Matter of Originsprovides an accessible point of entry, with its clear explication of key terms together with their historical and conceptual background. For readers familiar with Lacanian theory, the book offers a reconceptualization of the evolution of his teachings from literary-critical, cultural, and biographical perspectives; it also presents a new approach to Lacan through the interplay of influences integral to the formation of his revisionary thought.

Author Biography

Shuli Barzilai is Associate Professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the co-editor (with Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan and Leona Toker) of Reading Texts/Rereading Critical Presuppositions.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations	xi
Introduction: From ``Maternal Presence'' to ``Maternal Object''	1	(7)
A Brief History of The Origin of the World: Courbet and Lacan	8	(11)
Early Hetero-Orthodoxies: Lacan's Family Complexes	19	(29)
``History Is Not the Past'': Lacan's Critique of Ferenczi	48	(20)
On Chimpanzees and Children in the Looking-Glass: Wallon's Mirror Experiments and Lacan's Theory of Reflexive Recognition	68	(22)
Topographies of Conflict: The Machia in the Mirror Stage	90	(21)
``Lacannibalism'': The Return to Freud's Idea of Identification	111	(33)
Augustine in Contexts (Part I): The Riddle of a Repetition	144	(22)
Augustine in Contexts (Part 2): Three Variations on a Scene from the Confessions	166	(33)
``Grandma, what a dreadfully big mouth you have!'': Lacan's Parables of the Maternal Object	199	(50)
Epilogue: Borders of Language: Kristeva's Critique of Lacan	227	(22)
Notes	249	(22)
Works Cited	271	(18)
Index	289