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“... a ‘maturer self’, now able to deal with them. The catch, of course – or, for the inimitable Jacques Lacan, the joke – is that the version that the later self will allow into consciousness cannot be anything other than a translation, an alteration, even a new story. The history of maturation depends upon deferred action, upon the deferred rather ...”

“... thinkers who are most admired in ‘advanced’ literary-critical circles – writers like Jacques Lacan – are obscurantists who openly scorn validation, and the concepts most in vogue, such as the death instinct, tend to be those most distant from any possibility of confirmation. Do you still admire Freud in spile of everything? I admire Freud ...”

“... of psychoanalysis are undergoing the same kind of questioning, one so traumatically introduced by Jacques Lacan in the 1950s. Even in circles independent of Lacan the relation of analyst and patient, together with a notion of counter – transference (the resistance, and attraction, of physician to patient, and how it ...”

“... It’s always because their excesses happen to coincide with your own. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII:The Other Side of Psychoanalysis Now that the Freud wars are over it seems a good time for a new translation. This is certainly a good time for psychoanalysis: because it is so widely discredited, because there is no prestige, or ...”

“... French intellectuals and the cultured French public need new toys every ten or 15 years.’ When Jacques Lacan drew on his ideas to argue that the unconscious was ‘structured like a language’, he recoiled. Lacan had been a friend – he had introduced Lévi-Strauss to his third wife, Monique, his partner for the ...”

“... Jacques Derrida once defined his intellectual project with the aid of an image from the Biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. It was a question, he suggested, of ‘vomiting up’ philosophy and restoring her to the ‘sea of texts’ from which she had proudly withdrawn. Those who would like to take the allegory further might reflect that Jonah was not in fact precipitated into the sea but onto dry land, and lost no time in prophesying doom to the great city of Nineveh ...”

“... Plenty of others were on the trail in the 1980s and 1990s, especially in France. They included Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as a Duke University elite in the US. In a survey of the trend in the journal Anthropoetics in 1997, Douglas Collins wrote that back in 1984 Julia Kristeva had noted that ‘we’re in the middle of ...”

“... in Picasso’s circle) the artist came back from a meeting – or was it a session? – with Jacques Lacan. They had fallen out over a recent murder case. Earlier in the year two maids from Le Mans, the Papin sisters, had slaughtered their mistress and her daughter. They had gouged out their victims’ eyes, beaten them to death and then gone to ...”

“... most talented students of the day. It also gave birth to a cluster of international superstars – Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Umberto Eco – who were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and ...”

“... have been so recklessly abducted. The thinkers pressed shoulder to shoulder in the dock here – Lacan, Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Deleuze/Guattari and one or two lesser figures – turn out not to know their mathematical arse from their physical elbow when they choose to steal food from Sokal and Bricmont’s ...”

“... which are cited only for authority, never for further reflection, and with no sense that Foucault, Lacan, Irigaray, Baudrillard and Barthes might not all be saying basically the same thing. For instance, on the question of authentic painterly expression: Arguments against Rosenberg are legion. ‘Unmediated expression is a philosophical ...”

“... when some psychoanalysts were stressing the philosophical impossibility of self-knowledge – in Jacques Lacan’s work the ego is likened to a series of reflecting and distorting mirrors – Winnicott spoke of analysis in far more optimistic terms. Characteristically, he quotes Lacan on mirrors as though in support ...”

“... figure who somehow, in ways that remain to be defined, presides over all Žižek’s work. One of Jacques Lacan’s late seminars has the title Les Non-Dupes errent. The joke lies in the homophony of this enigmatic proposition (‘the undeceived are mistaken’) with the oldest formula in the Lacanian book, ‘le nom du Père’, the name of the Father ...”

“... saw them. And no one listened to the Madman. It is 1939 with regard to the world of letters, and Jacques Derrida is telling us to wake up. But we don’t listen. Thus spoke Zarathustra, as I recall, in an aggressively lyrical strain unsoftened on this occasion by any hint of Glas-nost. How odd that Derrida, one of whose democratic themes has been the need ...”

“... women writers, feminist theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis couldn’t avoid Marguerite Duras. Lacan himself had said of Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein that ‘Marguerite Duras turns out to know what I teach without me,’ and I remember dutifully trying to make sense of that novel within the Lacanian framework. I now realise that I was treating the text ...”