Lacan and the Nonhuman

Abstract

This book initiates the discussion between psychoanalysis and recent humanist and social scientific interest in a fundamental contemporary topic - the nonhuman. The authors question where we situate the subject (as distinct from the human) in current critical investigations of a nonanthropoentric universe. In doing so they unravel a less-than-human theory of the subject; explore implications of Lacanian teachings in relation to the environment, freedom, and biopolitics; and investigate the subjective enjoyments of and anxieties over nonhumans in literature, film, and digital media. This innovative volume fills a valuable gap in the literature, extending investigations into an important and topical strand of the social sciences for both analytic and pedagogical purposes. Chicken knowledge: or, What does the nonhuman want? / Gautam Basu Thakur and Jonathan Michael Dickstein -- Definitions and contexts. -- Toward a less-than-human psychoanalysis: coitus interruptus and the object / Jamieson Webster -- A horse: No worse? Phobia and the failure of human metaphors in psychoanalysis / Celeste Pietrusza and Jess Dunn -- The human not in the human / A. Kiarina Kordela -- L'extermination de tout symbolisme des cieux: reading the Lacanian Letter as inhuman 'apparatus' and its implications for ecological thinking / Kevin Andrew Spicer -- Lacanian anti-humanism and freedom / Ed Pluth -- The sovereign signifier: Agamben and the nonhuman / Paul Eisenstein -- Applications. -- Triplicity in Spencer-Brown, Lacan, and Poe / Don Kunze -- Like an animal: a simile instead of a subject / Todd McGowan -- Beckett's 'Marionette Theater': psychoanalysis, ontological violence, and the language of desubjectification in Stories and The unnamable / Amanda Duncan -- Do electric sheep dream of androids?: on the place of fantasy in consideration of the nonhuman / Calum Neill -- ASMR mania, trigger-chasing, and the anxiety of digital repletion / Hugh S. Manon -- For the love of nonhumanity: anxiety, the phallus, transference, and algorithmic criticism / Jonathan Michael Dickstein.