Synopses & Reviews
Among the numerous introductions to Lacan published to date in English, Philippe Julien's work is certainly outstanding. Beyond its conceptual clarity the book constitutes an excellent guide to Lacanian psychoanalytic practice.
--Andr Patsalides, Psychoanalyst and President, Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis
From 1953 to 1980, Jacques Lacan sought to accomplish a return to Freud beyond post- Freudianism. He defined this return as a new convenant with the meaning to the Freudian discovery. Each year through his teaching, he brought about this return. What was at stake in this renewal?
Philippe Julien, who joined Lacan's Ecole Freudienne de Paris in 1968, attempts to answer this question. Situtated in the period after-Lacan, Julien shows that Lacan's return to Freud was neither a closing of the Freudian text by responding to questions left unanswered nor a reopening of the text by giving endless new interpretations. Neither dogmatic nor hermeneutic, Lacan's return to Frued was the return of an inevitable discordance between our experience of the unconscious and any attempt to give an account of it. For the unconscious, by its very nature, disappears at the same moment as it is discovered. It is in this sense that the author can claim that Lacan's return to Freud will have been Freudian.
Constantly challenging the reader to submit to the rigors of Lacan's sinuous thinking, this penetrating work goes far beyond being a mere introduction. Rendered into elegant English by the American translator, who added numerous footnotes and scholarly references to the French original, this study brings Lacanian scholarship among English readers to a new level of sophistication.
Neither dogmatic nor hermeneutic, Lacan's return to Freud was the return of an inevitable discordance between our experience of the unconscious and any attempt to give an account of it. For the unconscious, by its very nature, disappears at the same moment as it is discovered. It is in this sense that the author can claim that Lacan's return to Freud was Freudian.
Review
“An engaging, original, readable work. . . . Highly recommended.”
-CHOICE,
Review
“Through a bricolage of carefully crafted textual readings, Lima has produced a text that traces the relationship between corporeality and citizenship by marking the process by which the Latino body has 'become historical.' Situated in moments of national and bodily crisis, his archive is decidedly precise and imaginatively expansive, metaphorically rich and politically dynamic. Drawing on texts central to third world feminism, queer studies, and Latin and Latino American literatures, this work is as central to rethinking the American literary canon as it is to an invigorating remapping of Latino Studies.”
-Juana Maria Rodriguez,author of Queer Latinidad
Review
“Limas Latino Body promises to productively disrupt the business-as-usual of critical and scholarly practice in the still-emerging field of U.S. Latino studies; it will contribute directly to the next stage in the long process of what it itself terms Latino identity's 'becoming historical' in North American cultural, political, and intellectual contexts. For this reason alone, The Latino Body could not be more welcome, or more timely.”
-Ricardo L. Ortiz,Georgetown University
Review
“Reading a wide range of texts, he provides a sophisticated and important critique of the limits of US citizenship for Latinos.”
-Melus, vol.34,
Synopsis
Philippe Julien's JACQUES LACAN'S RETURN TO FREUD is an introduction to basic Lacanian thought and to the historical development of that thought from its earliest stirrings in 1932 to its efflorescence between 1953 and Lacan's death in 1981. The book's inspired focus on the stages of Lacan's transformatoin of the concepts of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary offers a new take on the French analyst's emergence not as a 'Lacanian,' but as a 'Freudian.'
Synopsis
The Latino Body tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. Lázaro Lima charts the interrelated groups that define themselves as Latinos and examines how these groups have responded to calls for unity and nationally shared conceptions of American cultural identity. He contends that their responses, in times of cultural or political crisis, have given rise to profound cultural transformations, enabling the so-called “Latino subject“ to emerge.
Analyzing a variety of cultural, literary, artistic, and popular texts from the nineteenth century to the present, Lima dissects the ways in which the Latino body has been imagined, dismembered, and reimagined anew, providing one of the first comprehensive accounts of the construction of Latino cultural identity in the United States.
About the Author
Philippe Julien is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Paris and is co-founder of the Ecole Lacanienne de Psychanalyse. He is the author of
Le Manteau de No: Essai sur la paternit.
Devra Bech Simiu received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University and is currently working on a book about Lacan's theory of the mirror stage.