Levinas and Lacan: The Missed Encounter

Buy Levinas and Lacan here.

Draws attention to the enigmatic missed encounter between Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Lacan, and articulates the theoretical stakes and practical consequences of such a disjunctive encounter for ethics.

"Levinas and Lacan brings together an excellent selection of essays written by some of the most talented thinkers working in the fields of contemporary ethics and psychoanalysis in the United States and Europe. It suggests the possibility of a critical encounter between Levinas and Lacan by focusing not only on the comparative study of the crucial concepts in the Levinasian ethics and the Lacanian psychoanalysis but also on the rigorous questioning of the philosophical tradition undertaken by each thinker, in particular, the legacies of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. This dual strategy allows for complex and nuanced reassessments of Lacan's and Levinas's contributions to the contemporary debates about ethics, without either forcing similarities or staging a more antagonistic confrontation between them. I am convinced that this collection will set the tone for any future discussions of ethics and psychoanalysis." -- Ewa Ponowska Ziarek, author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism

Levinas and Lacan traces the similar concepts and logics of Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas, to explicitly render the rigorous questioning of the philosophic tradition undertaken by these thinkers, and to articulate the theoretical stakes and practical consequences of such a conjunction for ethics. In this book, contemporary philosophers examine this missed encounter between Levinas and Lacan by tracing their preoccupation with issues that emerge in late modernity: language, subjectivity, alterity, and ethics.

"Each of the essays makes clear connections between Lacan and Levinas or provides readings of one or the other that are truly unexpected and enlightening. As a collection, it is especially exciting insofar as it seems to herald a new approach to critical thinking about ethics, intertextuality, and inter-discursivity, a new possibility of critique that is neither simply cultural nor philosophical, but negotiates a difficult path between the two." -- Kenneth Reinhard, UCLA

Sarah Harasym has a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Alberta and is earning a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Duquesne University. She has also edited Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogue.