The Logic of Sexuation

From Aristotle to Lacan

Ellie Ragland

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780791460788, 9780791460771
• eBook ISBN: 9780791485149
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Challenges essentialist notions of gender through a detailed account of Lacan's theories of gender, sexuality, and sexual difference.

2004 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title

In The Logic of Sexuation, Ellie Ragland offers a detailed account of Jacques Lacan's theories of gender, sexuality, and sexual difference. Exploring Lacan's rereading (via Aristotle) of Freud's major essays on feminine sexuality, Ragland demonstrates that Lacanian theory challenges essentialist notions of gender more effectively than do current debates in gender studies, which are typically enmeshed in an imaginary impasse of one sex versus or interchanged with the other. Although much American feminist thought on Lacan has portrayed him as anti-Woman, Ragland argues that Lacan was, in fact, pro-Woman, as he felt that no advances in analytic cure, or in thinking itself, could evolve except by embracing the feminine logic of the "not all, " with its particular modes of jouissance. Ragland also aims to make sense of the terms phallus, castration, sexuation, the object a, jouissance, and so on, in relation to the question of sexual difference. In doing so, she uncovers Lacan's theory that the learning of sexual difference is what makes it possible to think dialectically at all.

Table of contents

• The Logic of Sexuation
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1. “On the Signification of the Phallus” (1958) According to Lacan
• 2. Freud’s “Female Sexuality” (1931) and “Femininity” (1932): Oedipus Revisited via the Lacanian Pre-Oedipus
• 3. Feminine Sexuality, or Why the Sexual Difference Makes All the Difference: Lacan’s “For a Congress on Feminine Sexuality” (1958)
• 4. A Rereading of Freud’s 1925 Essay: “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” through Lacan’s Theory of Sexuation
• 5. The Place of the Mother in Lacanian Analysis: Lacan’s Theory of the Object, or Castration Rethought
• Conclusion
• NOTES
• Index