This book is the first to develop a Baudrillardian critique of the problematic way Lacanian psychoanalysis, as a clinical practice and by extension as a source of socio-cultural and philosophical theory, continues its vain attempt to (re)animate a subject of the unconscious. The text throws into question Lacan’s notion of the ‘real,’ the unconscious ‘structured as a language,’ and his construct of surplus, while interrogating the links between psychoanalysis and Marxism. It shows how Lacanian psychoanalysis, with its questionable ethics, transpires as an endlessly recursive simulation model.
Lacan’s clinical seminar was influential in the intellectual milieu of Paris while Baudrillard was writing. Although frequently referring to psychoanalysis, Baudrillard never wrote a detailed critique of psychoanalysis; the scaffolding of such a work, however, transpires throughout the extent of his writing. The text also outlines Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis stressing how the alternative they propose remains within the oppressive terms of our current world.
This book is an essential resource for social, critical, cultural, literary, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory. While of interest to students, researchers, and scholars of Jean Baudrillard’s work and Lacanian psychoanalysis, this book particularly addresses those for whom not all is well with psychoanalysis, opening towards renewed directions through questioning.
Introduction
1. The scene of the real
2. Entanglements of desire, lack, and production
3. The unconscious does not exist
4. Remainders and surpluses
5. Quandaries of simulation and dissimulation
6. Beyond belief
Biography
Victoria Grace is an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. With a background in sociology and psychology, her research and teaching has been in the fields of gender studies, psychosocial studies, and critical theory. Relevant book publications include Baudrillard’s Challenge, A Feminist Reading (2000), Victims, Gender and Jouissance (2012), Baudrillard West of the Dateline (2003) co-edited with Heather Worth and Laurence Simmons, and Theorizing Sexual Violence, co-edited with Renée Heberle.
