Lacan in Contexts
In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan’s work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous “return to Freud” is shown to mask Lacan’s adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself.
A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan’s work, Lacan in Contexts is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.
Paperback, 336 pages
ISBN: 9780860919421
January 1988
$39.95 / £26.99
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Dr David Macey 1949—2011
It is our sad duty to announce the loss of Dr David Macey, translator and writer. A much respected and admired Verso author and champion of Francophone thought in the English speaking world, he will be greatly missed. His colleague, Professor Diana Holmes of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Leeds, has written the following on his passing:
It is with great sadness that the French Subject groups at the Universities of Leeds and Nottingham report the death of Dr David Macey. David had been for many years a highly esteemed research associate at Leeds, and in 2010 was appointed Special Professor at Nottingham. David Macey, born in Sunderland in 1949, studied at University College London and became a highly acclaimed writer and translator particularly in the field of contemporary French philosophy and political thought. Among his numerous and influential publications, many of them widely translated, were Lacan in Contexts (1988), The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (2000), Frantz Fanon: A Life (2000 - described by the New Statesman as 'the year's biographical tour de force'), and Michel Foucault (2004). He translated over sixty books from French, including Michel Foucault's Society Must be Defended (2003), and more recently Christian Baudelot and Roger Establet, Suicide (2008) Jean-Claude Kauffmann, The Single Woman and the Fairy-Tale Prince (2008), Boris Cyrulnik, Resilience (2009), and Michel Wieviorka, Violence (2009). David was the husband of Professor Margaret Atack (University of Leeds), and the father of Aaron, John and Chantelle.
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Frantz Fanon
Comprehensive and eloquent account of Fanon's personal, intellectual and political life.by David Macey