By Todd McGowan, Sheila Kunkle

This detailed quantity collects a chain of essays that hyperlink new advancements in Lacanian psychoanalytic idea and up to date developments in modern cinema. although Lacanian thought has lengthy had a privileged position within the research of movie, movie thought has tended to disregard a few of Lacan's most crucial rules. for that reason, Lacanian movie idea hasn't ever adequately built-in the disruptive and troubling facets of the filmic adventure that end result from the stumble upon with the genuine that this adventure makes attainable. Many modern theorists emphasize the significance of the come upon with the true in Lacan's idea, yet hardly ever in discussions of movie. via bringing the stumble upon with the genuine into the discussion of movie conception, the members to this quantity current a brand new model of Lacan to the area of movie stories. those essays deliver this rediscovered Lacan to undergo on modern cinema via research of a wide selection of movies together with Memento, Eyes extensive close, Breaking the Waves, and Fight Club. the flicks mentioned right here call for a flip to Lacanian conception simply because they emphasize the disruptive position of the true and of jouissance within the adventure of the human topic. There are an increasing number of motion pictures in modern cinema that talk to film's energy to problem and disturb the complacency of spectators, and the essays in Lacan and modern Film examine a few of these motion pictures and produce their strength to mild. as a result of its twin specialise in advancements in Lacanian idea and in modern movie, this assortment serves as either an obtainable advent to present Lacanian movie conception and an advent to the examine of latest cinema. each one essay presents an obtainable, jargon-free research of 1 or extra vital movies, and even as each one explains and makes use of key techniques of Lacanian thought. the gathering levels an stumble upon among Lacanian thought and modern cinema, and the result's the enrichment of either.

Show description

Read or Download Lacan and Contemporary Film PDF

Best psychoanalysis books

O mal-estar na cultura

Perguntando-se sobre os critérios – ao seu ver equivocados – usados pelos seres humanos para eleger os valores da vida que lhes são caros e assim traçar caminhos na busca pela felicidade, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) inicia uma reflexão sobre a origem da necessidade do sentimento religioso no homem.

Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Meeting

The perennial curiosity in psychoanalysis exhibits no indicators of abating, and the durability of psychoanalytic idea is obvious within the assorted extensions and embellishments of Freudian pondering within the fields of neuroscience and cognitive concept. the long-lasting curiosity in psychoanalysis is, in lots of respects, comprehensible: psychoanalytic idea addresses such matters as subconscious psychological techniques, self-deception, and wish-fulfilment, and makes daring claims when it comes to utilizing those recommendations to provide an explanation for either daily behaviour and scientific phenomena.

Clinical Practice and the Architecture of the Mind

This e-book presents an outstanding advent to the speculation and means of communicative psychoanalysis and hyperlinks it with the becoming box of evolutionary psychoanalysis. It offers a transparent and stimulating account of a few of the latest advancements of lang's hugely unique and contraversial paintings, which many practitioners proceed to discover deepy unsettling.

The Freudian moment

Bollas eloquently argues for a go back to our realizing of the way Freudian psychoanalysis works subconscious to subconscious. Failure to persist with Freud's uncomplicated assumptions approximately psychoanalytical listening has ended in the abandonment of looking for "the common sense of series" which Freud considered as the first method we exhibit subconscious considering.

Additional resources for Lacan and Contemporary Film

Example text

17-18). 12. For an overview of the history informed by this notion, see Blatner (1997). Blatner notes that no measurement realistically requires even 100 digits of pi—engineers routinely use no more than seven and physicists use no more than fifteen or twenty. For him, the search for pi is "deeply rooted in the human spirit of exploration—of both our minds and our world—and in our irrepressible drive to test our limits" (p. 3). As Blatner sees it, IT separates the line between the finite and the infinite and thus represents a mystery to be appreciated.

Thus we might clarify the Lacanian dimension of the counterideological thrust of Aronofsky's film by saying that rather than eschew the imaginary altogether as ipso facto ideological, n attempts to break its privileged link to the symbolic so as to illuminate the terror of its real, presymbolic status. 20 Rather than realistic, coherent mirror images offered up for our easy identification, rather than a fantasized compatibility between jouissance and symbolization, Aronofsky gives us instead images of jouissance that overwhelm the coherence of the film.

Indeed, as Lacan points out, what is most distinctive about the existence of the signifier—the possibility of it being used not to inform but to lure—is precisely what does not belong to the psychic economy of the psychotic. For the psychotic, every exchange of words is informational. Put another way, psychotics fail to observe the Lacanian distinction between a signifier that signifies without being significant. In short, for the psychotic, every word is significant; no word merely signifies. Psychoanalysis, however, stakes our equilibrium on the non-sensical dimension of the pure signifier.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.91 of 5 – based on 22 votes