This book is a close reading of Jacques Lacan's seminal essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, " selected for the particular light it casts on Lacan's complex relation to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. It clarifies the way Lacan renews or transforms the psychoanalytic field, through his diversion of Saussure's theory of the sign, his radicalization of Freud's fundamental concepts, and his subversion of dominant philosophical values. The authors argue, however, that Lacan's discourse is marked by a deep ambiguity: while he invents a new...

Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan is the first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work. Juan-David Nasio makes numerous theoretical advances and eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments. What is distinctive, in the end, about Nasio's treatment of Lacan's theory is the extent to which Lacan's fundamental concepts--the unconscious, jouissance, and the body--become the locus of the overturning or exceeding of the discrete boundaries of the...

Appearing in English for the first time, Jean-Luc Nancy's 2002 book reflects on globalization and its impact on our being-in-the-world. Developing a contrast in the French language between two terms that are usually synonymous, or that are used interchangeably, namely globalisation (globalization) and mondialisation (world-forming), Nancy undertakes a rethinking of what "world-forming" might mean. At stake in this distinction is for him nothing less than two possible destinies of our humanity, and of our time. On the one hand, with globalization, there is the uniformity produced by a global...

In The Book of Love and Pain, Juan-David Nasio offers the first exclusive treatment of psychic pain in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic literature. Using insights gained from more than three decades as a practicing psychoanalyst, Nasio addresses the limits faced by the analyst in attempting to think and treat pain psychoanalytically. He suggests that while pain is about separation and loss, psychic pain is intensified by paradoxical overinvestment in the lost loved one. Included are discussions of the pain of mourning, the pain of jouissance, unconscious pain, pain as an object of the...