Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis

Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis offers readers eight probing, crackling, and urgently compelling essays that draw out the ways in which Jacques Derrida's work with psychoanalysis refuses the simplistic and falsifying epistemological separation of the psychic and the social, or the psychic and the political. These essays, through their thorough and thoughtful discussions of the convergence and divergences between Derrida's and Deleuze's respective treatments of foundational concepts in psychoanalysis, serve an invaluable goal of dispelling the tendency of critical thought in recent decades to consider psychoanalysis and politics, or the psychic and the political, as separate. -- Liz Constable, the University of California at Davis This volume stages a much needed encounter between Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, two most influential thinkers of our time, on the ground of a certain resistance to psychoanalysis. The numerous points of intersection addressed in this volume are vertiginous and fascinating: buccality, bestiality, stupidity, perversion, childhood, animality, performance in film and media, race, political resistance and pain. By staging a comparative reading of these two thinkers, this volume opens a space beyond comparison, a monstrous, polymorphously perverse realm of psychoanalysis yet to come. -- Dragan Kujundzic, professor of Jewish studies, Germanic and Slavic studies, and film and media studies at the University of Florida. He is also the author of Returns of History, Tongue in Heat, and co-editor of Provocations to Reading.

Explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida and Deleuze. This book illuminates the relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics.Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis explores the critical relationship between psychoanalysis and the work of Derrida (Speech and Phenomena, Of Grammatology, and his later writing on autoimmunity, cruelty, war, and human rights) and Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus, Anti-Oedipus, and more). Each essay illuminates a specific aspect of Derrida's and Deleuze's perspectives on psychoanalysis: the human-animal boundary; the child's polymorphism; the face or mouth as constitutive of ethical responsibility toward others; the connections between pain and suffering and political resistance; the role of masochism in psychoanalytic thinking; the use of psychoanalytic secondary revision in theorizing film; and the political dimension of the unconscious. Placing a particular emphasis on liminal figurations of the human and challenges to discourses on free will, the essays explore shared concerns in Derrida and Deleuze with regard to history, politics, the political unconscious, and resistance. By addressing the need to overcome the split between the psychological and the political, Derrida, Deleuze, Psychoanalysis illuminates the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to critical interrogations of culture and politics.