Lacan Jouissance And The Social Sciences

Exploring how a Freudian-Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis intersects with social and cultural theory, Lacan, Jouissance, and the Social Sciences demonstrates the significance of subjectivity as a concept for the study of leadership, social psychology, culture, and political theory. Raul Moncayo examines Lacan’s notion of surplus jouissance in relation to four types of socio-economic value: Productive Value, Exchange Value, Surplus Value, and Profit. Also drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, Moncayo contends that surplus production cannot be reduced to alienated labor but rather includes various levels of jouissance-value. In this way, the jouissance that drives capitalization and organization can be theorized as constructive rather than destructive and encompass satisfaction and prosperity rather than individual suffering and asceticism or living with less. This volume will be of great interest to psychoanalysts both in practice and in training and to academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, Lacanian studies, and social sciences.

Exploring how a Freudian-Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis intersects with social and cultural theory, Lacan, Jouissance, and the Social Sciences demonstrates the significance of subjectivity as a concept for the study of leadership, social psychology, culture, and political theory. Raul Moncayo examines Lacan’s notion of surplus jouissance in relation to four types of socio-economic value: Productive Value, Exchange Value, Surplus Value, and Profit. Also drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, Moncayo contends that surplus production cannot be reduced to alienated labor but rather includes various levels of jouissance-value. In this way, the jouissance that drives capitalization and organization can be theorized as constructive rather than destructive and encompass satisfaction and prosperity rather than individual suffering and asceticism or living with less. This volume will be of great interest to psychoanalysts both in practice and in training and to academics and scholars of psychoanalytic studies, Lacanian studies, and social sciences.

Lacan critiqued imaginary intuition for confusing direct perception with unconscious pre-conceptions about people and the world. The emphasis on description goes hand in hand with a rejection of theory and the science of the unconscious and a belief in the naive self-transparency of the world. At the same time, knowing in and of the Real requires a place beyond thinking, multi-valued forms of logic, mathematical equations, and different conceptions of causality, acausality, and chance. This book explores some of the mathematical problems raised by Lacan's use of numbers and the interconnection between mathematics and psychoanalytic ideas. Within any system, mathematical or otherwise, there are holes, or acausal cores and remainders of indecidability. It is this senseless point of non-knowledge that makes change, and the emergence of the new, possible within a system. This book differentiates between two types of void, and aligns them with the Lacanian concepts of a true and a false hole and the psychoanalytic theory of primary repression.

The Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalysis in the Social Sciences and Humanities provides a comprehensive, critical overview of the historical, theoretical and applied forms of psychoanalytical criticism. This path-breaking Handbook offers students new ways of understanding the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, and of the social, cultural and political possibilities of psychoanalytic critique. The book offers students and professionals clear and concise chapters on the development of psychoanalysis, introducing key theories that have influenced debates over the psyche, desire and emotion in the social sciences and humanities. There are substantive chapters on classical Freudian theory, Kleinian and Bionian theory, object-relations psychoanalysis, Lacanian and post-Lacanian approaches, feminist psychoanalysis, as well as postmodern trends in psychoanalysis. There is a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to psychoanalytic critique, with contributions drawing from developments in sociology, politics, history, cultural studies, women’s studies and architecture.

Kierkegaard has long been known as a philosopher and theologian, but his contributions to psychology, anthropology and sociology have also made an important impact on these fields. In many of the works of his complex authorship, Kierkegaard presents his intriguing and unique vision of the nature and mental life of human beings individually and collectively. The articles featured in the present volume explore the reception of Kierkegaard's thought in the social sciences. Of these fields Kierkegaard is perhaps best known in psychology, where The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death have been the two most influential texts. With regard to the field of sociology, social criticism, or social theory, Kierkegaard's Literary Review of Two Ages has also been regarded as offering valuable insights about some important dynamics of modern society..

This book explores the practice and transmission of Lacanian and Freudian theory. It discusses the pure versus applied analysis of Lacanian and Freudian theory in practice; and the hierarchical versus circular transmissions within psychoanalytic organizations. Underpinned by extensive practical knowledge of the clinic, this work examines the differences between Freud and Lacan in their understanding of the subject and the unconscious and pushes them in new directions. The book also offers an analysis and commentary of several key Lacanian texts including an accessible study of the notoriously challenging text L'etourdit. Offering both divergent and reinforcing takes on Lacan, the author explores the traits that separate out the psychoanalyst from other twentieth-century thinkers and theorists. This book offers a clear clinical picture of where Lacanian psychoanalysis is today, both in the US and internationally.

In this Palgrave Pivot, Duane Rousselle aims to disrupt the hold that pragmatist ideology has had over American sociology by demonstrating that the social bond has always been founded upon a fundamental and primordial bankruptcy. Using the Lacanian theory of “capitalist discourse,” Rousselle demonstrates that most of early American sociology suffered from an inadequate account of the “symbolic” within the mental and social lives of the individual subject. The psychoanalytic aspect of the social bond remained theoretically undeveloped in the American context. Instead it is the “image,” a product of the imaginary, which takes charge over any symbolic function. This intervention into pragmatic sociology seeks to recover the tradition of “grand theory” by bringing psychoanalytical and sociological discourse into fruitful communication with one another.

Victimization has a long, cross-cultural history. The status of the victim has been the source of active and stirring controversy in cultural theory, criminology and legal theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis; it is of particular interest within feminist theory. Can the victim relation be refused? Are we all victims? The aim of this book is to analyze the intersection of gender and the victim, and the role of a libidinal enjoyment (jouissance) in knotting this relation. The enduring link between the construct of the victim and the sacrificial processes at its heart reveals something ultimately compelling about sacrifice. Legislating victimization out of existence will fail because the victim relation is central to the very formation of human subjectivity and implicated in the reproduction of social life. Lacanian psychoanalysis is used to interrogate the limits to arguments for resolving the problem of sacrificial violence: from Girard to Bataille, from Butler to Kristeva, from de Sade to Nietzsche. However, without denying the inevitable structuring power of the signifier, only its relentless reversion, or undoing, will expose the myths that sustain it, and create an opening within the social beyond this impasse. Such a break is theorized through a confrontation of Lacan with Baudrillard.