Lacan and the Nonhuman

Description

This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic – the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject (as distinct from the human) in current critical investigations of a nonanthropoentric universe. In doing so they unravel a less-than-human theory of the subject; explore implications of Lacanian teachings in relation to the environment, freedom, and biopolitics; and investigate the subjective enjoyments of and anxieties over nonhumans in literature, film, and digital media. This innovative volume fills a valuable gap in the literature, extending investigations into an important and topical strand of the social sciences for both analytic and pedagogical purposes. Front Matter ....Pages i-ix Chicken Knowledge: Or, What Does the Nonhuman Want? (Gautam Basu Thakur, Jonathan Michael Dickstein)....Pages 1-16 Front Matter ....Pages 17-17 Toward a Less-Than-Human Psychoanalysis: Coitus Interruptus and the Object (Jamieson Webster)....Pages 19-41 A Horse: No Worse? Phobia and the Failure of Human Metaphors in Psychoanalysis (Celeste Pietrusza, Jess Dunn)....Pages 43-61 The Human Not in the Human (A. Kiarina Kordela)....Pages 63-100 L’extermination de tout Symbolisme des Cieux: Reading the Lacanian Letter as Inhuman ‘Apparatus’ and Its Implications for Ecological Thinking (Kevin Andrew Spicer)....Pages 101-120 Lacanian Anti-Humanism and Freedom (Ed Pluth)....Pages 121-134 The Sovereign Signifier: Agamben and the Nonhuman (Paul Eisenstein)....Pages 135-153 Front Matter ....Pages 155-155 Triplicity in Spencer-Brown, Lacan, and Poe (Don Kunze)....Pages 157-176 Like an Animal: A Simile Instead of a Subject (Todd McGowan)....Pages 177-198 Beckett’s ‘Marionette Theater’: Psychoanalysis, Ontological Violence, and the Language of Desubjectification in Stories and The Unnamable (Amanda Duncan)....Pages 199-212 Do Electric Sheep Dream of Androids?: On the Place of Fantasy in Consideration of the Nonhuman (Calum Neill)....Pages 213-225 ASMR Mania, Trigger-Chasing, and the Anxiety of Digital Repletion (Hugh S. Manon)....Pages 227-248 For the Love of Nonhumanity: Anxiety, the Phallus, Transference, and Algorithmic Criticism (Jonathan Michael Dickstein)....Pages 249-276 Back Matter ....Pages 277-286