Lacanian Antiphilosophy and the Problem of Anxiety: An Uncanny Little Object

ISBN-13: 9781137513526 / Angielski / Twarda / 2015 / 249 str.

Brian Robertson

Opis

The emotional life of any human being can be a confusing thing. For most of us, an everyday, common sense understanding of emotional life routinely compares and contrasts the experiences of anxiety and fear, as if the two emotions are cut from the same cloth. Similarly, nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers often conflated the emotions, conceiving of anxiety as a kind of objectless fear, or a lurking dread. In this book, Brian Robertson challenges those familiar lines of thinking through a close and innovative reading of Jacques Lacan's recently translated Anxiety Seminar. What would it take to think through the problem of anxiety without the handy recourse to fear? What if anxiety were not 'without an object'? Using these questions as a touchstone, Robertson brings Lacan's study of anxiety into jarring and fruitful confrontation with existentialist philosophy and phenomenology. The book explores anxiety's relations to desire, sadomasochism, love and sexual difference. Robertson investigates the tortured relationship between anxiety, language, and speech - developing a refreshingly original alternative to received, existentialist dogma.

Recenzje

'This exploration of anxiety provides not only a path-breaking rethinking of the concept of anxiety but also a wholly new way of thinking about Jacques Lacan. Through Robertson's careful analysis, we discover a Lacan who participates in the existentialist project by reformulating its key concepts rather than dismissing them. This book is a genuine breakthrough.' - Todd McGowan, University of Vermont, USA

'Robertson's focus here is Lacan's crucially important 1962-63 seminar on anxiety. Robertson locates Lacan's problematic in relation to phenomenological and existential conceptions of anxiety in Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, and provides detailed background on many of the seminar's more obscure references. The result is a useful illumination of an indispensable Lacanian text.' - Richard Boothby, Loyola University Maryland, USA

O autorze

Brian Robertson is an independent scholar residing in Washington, USA.