The other Side of Desire

Lacan's Theory of the Registers

Tamise Van Pelt

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791444764, 9780791444757
• eBook ISBN: 9780791493052
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Psychology

Explores Lacan's theory of the registers through readings of a wide variety of texts.

The other Side of Desire puts Jacques Lacan's theoretical constructs to work on texts as varied as Plato's Symposium, Hamlet, Tootsie, and the journals of Sylvia Plath, making the techniques of Lacanian analysis accessible to a wide variety of readers. Moving from oppositional readings of Lacan himself, through Lacan's search for an alternative to oppositionality, to his solution in the theory of the registers, Van Pelt rereads Lacan's most significant essays on aggressivity, the mirror stage, the subversion of the subject, and the signification of the phallus, making explicit the reading practices implicit in Lacan's first seven Seminars and his Écrits. Throughout, Van Pelt demonstrates Lacanian theory's pivotal role in the intellectual transition from the poststructuralism of the mid–twentieth century to the post-humanism of the twenty-first.

Table of contents

• The other Side of Desire: Lacan's Theory of the Registers
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• 1. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Symposium
• 2. The Master in the Mirror
• 3. The Poe-etics of Register Theory
• 4. Lacanian Epistemology
• 5. The Discourse of Desire and the Registers in Hamlet
• 6. Symptomatic Perfectionism in The Journals of Sylvia Plath
• 7. Being and Otherness
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index