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Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Reinhard Lupton,
After Oedipus:
Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis
About the book
Since Freud’s writings on
Oedipus
and
Hamlet,
Shakespearean tragedy has been paradigmatic for
psychoanalytic theory and criticism. In this ambitious and
highly imaginative book, L and R
trace the dialogue between psychoanalytic and literary
discourses by examining the models of plot, character and
ways of reading that each tradition has developed through
its interpretation of Shakespeare.
Interpreting key texts by Freud and Lacan, supplemented by
readings of Aristotle, Seneca, Benjamin, Nietzsche, Eliot,
and others, Reinhard and Lupton pursue the persistence of
Shakespearean motifs in the literature of psychoanalysis.
Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies, Hamlet and Lear, offer two
distinctive mappings of subjectivity in and for
psychoanalysis. Hamlet stages the traditionality of
tradition, the echo chamber through which cultural legacies
are mournfully preserved and passed on. While Hamlet is the
prince of melancholy, Lear is the king of catastrophe.
Whereas Hamlet maps the fundamental constellations of
neurotic subjectivity warped by the black holes of
melancholia, Lear threatens to expose those holes and
collapse into the voids of paranoia and psychosis. If Hamlet
is a labyrinth, a memory theatre of uncanny continuities in
which past and present, figure and ground, self and other,
run alongside together in the fluid medium of linguistic
association, Lear is a heath: open, wild, exposed, the place
where unaccommodated man – humanity in its creaturely
subsistence as bare life – wanders without sanctuary.
Together, these two plays map the tragic extremes of the
human condition, as disclosed by psychoanalysis.
After Oedipus demonstrates the persistence of
literary forms and motifs in the theoretical writings of
Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, offering paradigms for
reading literature and theory that extend beyond simple
models of application. A new chapter on Lacan and the Ten
Commandments maps the generative intersection between
religion and psychoanalysis, reflecting current interests in
political theology and religion and literature.
Contents
Preface to the second edition
Acknowledgments
A Note on Citations
Introduction
Part One: Hamlet in Psychoanalysis
1 "Shapes of Grief": Hamlet, Freud, and Mourning
2 The Trauerspiel of Criticism
3 Hamlet’s Flesh: Lacan and the Desire of the Mother
4 Hamlet’s "Ursceneca"
Inter-Section
Part Two: The Lear Real
5 The Motif of the Three Caskets
6 The Lacanian Thing
7 The Tragedy of Foreclosure
After-Word
Appendix: The Subject of Religion
Notes
Works Cited
Index
"Shakespeare’s plays abound
with lines which point towards the insights of Lacan’s
psychoanalytic theory—the effect is so uncanny that it
evokes the time-travel scenario of Shakespeare taking a trip
to the future in order to read Lacan’s seminars.
Shakespeare Has Read Lacan could also have been the
title of Lupton’s and Reinhard’s classic study—a must not
only for everyone who really wants to know Shakespeare or
Lacan, but simply for everyone who wants to understand the
ethical deadlock of our hedonist society. It is not a book
about what Shakespeare means to us, but a book about what we
mean (and are) in the eyes of Shakespeare."
— Slavoj Žižek
About the Authors
Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Reinhard Lupton teach English and
Comparative Literature at the University of California.
Kenneth Reinhard is co-author with Slavoj Žižek and Eric
Santner of
The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology.
Julia Reinhard Lupton is author of
Citizen-Saints:
Shakespeare and Political Theology and
Afterlives of the
Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and Renaissance Literature.
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