Table of Contents

Lacan’s Écrits Revisited: On Writing as Object of Desire / What Are Words Worth? Lacan and the Circulation of Money in the Psychoanalytic Economy / That Obscure Object of Psychoanalysis / The Sculptural Iconography of Feminine Jouissance: Lacan’s Reading of Bernini’s Saint Teresa in Ecstasy / Esprit de Corps, Work Transference and Dissolution: Lacan as an Organisational Theorist / Psychoanalysis as gai saber: Towards a New Episteme of Laughter / Once He Was a Poet: On Psychoanalysis as Poetry in Lacan’s Clinical Paradigm / Lacan’s Clinical Artistry: On Sublimation, Sublation and the Sublime / Lacan with Antigone: On Tragedy and Desire in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

About the Author

Dany Nobus is Professor of Psychoanalytic Psychology at Brunel University London, UK, Founding Scholar of the British Psychoanalytic Council, and former Chair and Fellow of the Freud Museum London. His previous books include Thresholds and Pathways Between Jung and Lacan: On the Blazing Sublime (edited with Ann Casement and Phil Goss, 2021), The Law of Desire: On Lacan’s ‘Kant with Sade’ (2017) and Knowing Nothing, Staying Stupid: Elements for a Psychoanalytic Epistemology (with Malcolm Quinn, 2005).

Reviews

"In his fast-paced Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason, Nobus asks crucial questions about Lacan’s theories and practice, not shying away from embarrassing issues like the use of variable sessions, the rationale of exorbitant fees, and traces of male chauvinism. Mapping the entire Lacanian field, this alert and funny book constructs a decagon—a polygon close to a circle—whose ten concepts are angles from which diagonals crisscross strategically. We follow effortlessly Lacan’s histories, theories and inventions, effectively squaring the circle of Freudian Unreason." Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences"In this hugely impressive book, which is written with exemplary clarity, erudition and verve, Dany Nobus dares to ask profound and daunting questions about why Lacan remains such a vital and challenging motivator for thinking. Propelled by the force of this question ("Why Lacan?"), Nobus enters into the most vexed and enriching zones of psychoanalytic reflection and takes the reader along with him. The book is thought-provoking, wonderfully argued, pedagogical, and playfully lucid. It is also a gripping read that will help re-introduce Lacan to a new generation of thinkers."Elissa Marder, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, Emory University