Title:  After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis Authors:  Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Reinhard Lupton Series:   Critical Studies in the Humanities Imprint:  The Davies Group, Publishers soft cover 310 pp. USD 28.00 ISBN 978-1888570359 March, 2009 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, Lupton and Reinhard 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 Review "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 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.