Lacan and the Nonhuman [Hardcover]

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.

PART I: DEFINITIONS AND CONTEXTS.- Chapter 1: Bestiarum Vocabulum Lacaniensis: A Concise Outline of Psychoanalytic Zoology by Dany Nobus (Brunel University London).- Chapter 2: Man is not Entirely in Man by Kiarina Kordela (Macalester University).- Chapter 3: Freud, Lacan, and the Human Nonhumanity of Coitus Interruptus by Jamieson Webster (Eugene Lang College and New York University).- Chapter 4: Lextermination de tout symbolisme des cieux: Reading the Lacanian Letter as Inhuman Apparatus and its Implications for Ecological Thinking by Kevin Andrew Spicer (University of St. Francis).- Chapter 5: Affective Posthumanism by Marie-Louise Angerer (University of Potsdam).- Chapter 6: The Undead: Lacan and Vico, the Critical Link by Donald Kunze (Penn State University).- Chapter 7: The Sovereign Signifier: Agamben and the Nonhuman by Paul Eisenstein (Otterbein University).- Chapter 8: Lacan and the Mechanism of Full Speech by Ed Pluth (California State University, Chino).- PART 2: APPLICATIONS.- Chapter 9: Like an Animal: A Simile Instead of a Subject by Todd McGowan (University of Vermont).- Chapter 10: A horseno worl3!