Lacan - by Elisabeth Roudinesco (Paperback)

About the Book

Translation of: Lacan, envers et contre tout.

Book Synopsis

Jacques Lacan continues to be subject to the most extravagant interpretations. Angelic to some, he is demonic to others. To recall Lacan's career, now that the heroic age of psychoanalysis is over, is to remember an intellectual and literary adventure that occupies a founding place in our modernity. Lacan went against the current of many of the hopes aroused by 1968, but embraced their paradoxes, and his language games and wordplay resonate today as so many injunctions to replace rampant individualism with a heightened social consciousness.

Widely recognized as the leading authority on Lacan, Élisabeth Roudinesco revisits his life and work: what it was - and what it remains.

Review Quotes

Praise for Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and History of a System of Thought

"[An] extraordinary book about the most flamboyant French neo-Freudian of the twentieth century."--The Times

"Elisabeth Roudinesco takes us on a fascinating journey ... fascinating like Lacan himself."--Michael Kajman, Le Monde

"She acknowledges Lacan's personal absurdity and literary extravagance while simultaneously showing why and how he matters. Ms. Roudinesco captures the freshness of the intellectual world in which Lacan's developing notions were concocted."--New York Times

Praise for Our Dark Side

"Required reading for all studies of the history of consciousness."--Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University

About the Author

Élisabeth Roudinesco teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She is the author of many books, including Jacques Lacan & Co. and Madness and Revolution.