Lacan’s Medievalism
ISBN: 9780816696949
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Minnesota Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Lacan Jacques 1901–1981; Psychoanalysis and philosophy; Medievalism; Desire;

One of the foundational premises of Jacques LacanOCOs psychoanalytical project was that the history of philosophy concealed the history of desire, and one of the goals of his work was to show how desire is central to philosophical thinking. In LacanOCOs Medievalism, Erin Felicia Labbie demonstrates how LacanOCOs theory of desire is bound to his reading of medieval texts. She not only alters the relationship between psychoanalysis and medieval studies, but also illuminates the ways that premodern and postmodern epochs and ideologies share a concern with the subject, the unconscious, and language, thus challenging notions of strict epistemological cuts. LacanOCOs psychoanalytic work contributes to the medieval debate about universals by revealing how the unconscious relates to the category of the real. By analyzing the systematic adherence to dialectics and the idealization of the hard sciences, LacanOCOs Medievalism asserts that we must take into account the play of language and desire within the unconscious and literature in order to understand the way that we know things in the world and the manner in which order is determined."


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