Lacan’s Cruelty

Lacan’s Cruelty provides an expansive analysis of the role that perverse cruelty plays in our psychic lives and in social relations. Including a range of impressive contributors (not limited to the usual suspects for a volume on Lacan), this collection offers several fecund avenues for rethinking encrusted conceptions of perversion. Meera Lee’s volume represents an indispensable contribution to the understanding of one of the most slippery psychoanalytic concepts. Each essay is an absolute gem. — Todd McGowan, Author of Universality and Identity Politics and Professor of Film Studies at the University of Vermont, USA Lacan's Cruelty brings us a powerful group of reliable thinkers with a strong international reach, who work across the border between philosophy and psychoanalysis, clinic and culture. These essays break decisively with the outmoded normative categories that guided previous scholarship on perversion, and reveal the far-reaching relevance of perversion to our current cultural dislocations of enjoyment. —Charles Shepherdson, Author of Lacan and the Limits of Knowledge and Professor of English at the University of Albany, USA This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, is a unique exploration of the novel aspects of perversion from the perspective of cruelty—a psychoanalytic study that has never been sufficiently undertaken in an English-speaking world. Instead of reducing the notion of perversion to cultural representations, a historical discourse or a clinical diagnosis, the authors in this collection draw on Freud, Kant, Hegel, Marquis de Sade, Derrida, Deleuze and Žižek to untie the knot of “psychic cruelty” intrinsic to perversion and therefore “de-sexualize” perverted acts. They do so by theorizing perversion in psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus complex, the-Name-of-the-Father and jouissance, and furthermore in the perspective of the clinics of neurosis and psychosis, in dialogue with a clinical praxis, philosophy and literature. Meera Lee is on the faculty of Asian American Studies Program at Hunter College, City University of New York, USA, and a psychoanalyst in analytic formation.