Essential reading for scholars and students in critical theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. How does the self care for itself in the posthumanist era? What psychic processes might allow the postmodern subject to find meaning and value in its life? Is it possible to delineate a theory of psychic potentiality that is compatible with poststructuralist models of fluid, decentered, and polyvalent subjectivity? Reinventing the Souloffers a new perspective on what it means to be a human being and to strive in the world despite the wounding effects of the socialization process. Drawing on the rich legacies of French poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ruti builds an affirmative alternative to the post-Foucaultian tendency to envision subjectivity as a function of hegemonic systems of power. She proposes that the subject's encounter with the world also necessarily activates the psyche's innovative potential. By focusing on matters of creative agency, imaginative empowerment, inner metamorphosis, and self-actualization, Ruti outlines some of the mechanisms by which the psyche manages not only to survive its lack, alienation, or suffering, but also to transform its abjection into an existentially livable reality. Central to Ruti's argument is the idea that human beings relate to the world in active rather than merely passive waysas dynamic creators of meaning rather than as powerless dupes of disciplinary power.

Mari Ruti

Mari Ruti received her Ph. D. from the Harvard University Comparative Literature Department in 2000. She teaches critical theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies at the University of Toronto English Department. She lives in Toronto.

Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

xi

Introduction

1

(36)

How Shall I Live?

1

(6)

Narrative Agency

7

(4)

Why Psychoanalysis?

11

(5)

Reinventing the Soul

16

(5)

The Future of Critical Theory

21

(5)

The Livable Life

26

(5)

The Other Side of Lack

31

(6)

1 Self

37

(36)

Living Up to One's Potential

37

(3)

The Self and the World

40

(9)

Nietzsche's Metaphors

49

(5)

The Doer Behind the Deed

54

(5)

Foucault's Care of the Self

59

(5)

Style and Askesis: Agency in the Context of Constraint

64

(5)

Myths of Existential Metamorphosis

69

(4)

2 Soul

73

(42)

"The Cheated Soul"

73

(3)

Fixed and Mobile Forms of Psychic Energy

76

(5)

Oppression and Inner Impoverishment

81

(6)

Repetition vs. Transformation

87

(8)

Eros and Self-Actualization

95

(6)

Beyond Autonomy vs. Sociality: Existential Intensity

101

(5)

Risking Love, Risking Oneself

106

(9)

3 Lack

115

(42)

Lacan's Gift of Speech

115

(6)

Heidegger's Poetic Dwelling

121

(5)

From the objet a to the Symbolic Other

126

(7)

The Responsibilities of Desire

133

(8)

What Can Lacan (Still) Offer to Feminist and Queer Theory?

141

(4)

Surface Pleasures, Psychic Inscriptions

145

(6)

The Posthumanist Soul

151

(6)

4 Past

157

(38)

The Ailing Spirit

157

(4)

A Love That Lasts: Melancholia's Commitments

161

(4)

The Creative Potential of Melancholia

165

(6)

Lacan vs. Kristeva

171

(5)

Cixous on Loss and Writing

176

(6)

Beyond Melancholia: Welcoming the Other as Other

182

(5)

Giving the Gift of Love

187

(8)

5 Pain

195

(30)

Mythologies of Being

195

(4)

Living the Past in the Present

199

(6)

Alms Thrown to a Beggar

205

(5)

Letting Suffering Lie upon Oneself

210

(4)

Amor Fati: Loving One's Fate

214

(2)

Suffering and Soulfulness

216

(4)

Finding (the) Consolation in Nietzsche

220

(5)

References

225

(6)

Index

231

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.