Overview

Jacques Lacan was fascinated with forms of the ""religious"" throughout his life, from monotheism, which shaped his account of the signifier, to modern occultism, as he was well acquainted with the writings of figures such as Oskar Goldberg and René Guénon. Lacan also repeatedly turned to non-European religiosities to test the limits of psychoanalytic theory. In his yearly seminars he engaged with traditions such as Kabbalah and Taoism, going beyond the Western Christian, capitalist and postcolonial setting of the French university to search for a possible outside to psychoanalysis. But such a quest ultimately recapitulates Lacan's constant awareness of the desire for a new master, and the still open question regarding the names and meanings that this desire may yield. This anthology of eleven essays, which travel from gnosticism to sufism, from afro-pessimism to post-68 ex-Maoist apocalypticism, investigates these unresolved threads that Lacan left behind. Beneath the exoteric psychoanalytic apparatus of Lacan's thought, there is an esoteric Lacan who remains unexplored.

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9781786609700

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Reviews

Can psychoanalysis be useful to cure anything more than the neuroses created by the European bourgeois family structure? This book finally tackles this most important issue by exploring the resources available for this task with Lacan's thinking. As such, it is a must read to deepen the much needed process of de-provincializing psychoanalysis. -- Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, New School for Social Research, authors of The Myth of the Clash of Civilizations

Author Information

Philipp Valentini is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Mahdi Tourage is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Social Justice and Peace Studies, King's University College at the Western University, Canada

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