Product details
- ISBN 9780745648231
- Weight: 581g
- Dimensions: 163 x 239mm
- Publication Date: 04 Dec 2009
- Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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Finding a common dissatisfaction with the dominant paradigms of social structures in the authors she discusses, Rothenberg goes on to show that each of these thinkers makes use of Lacan's investigations of the causality of subjectivity in an effort to find an alternative paradigm. Labeling this paradigm 'extimate causality', Rothenberg demonstrates how it produces a nondeterminacy, so that every subject bears some excess; paradoxically, this excess is what structures the social field itself. Whilst other theories of social change, subject formation, and political alliance invariably conceive of the elimination of this excess as necessary to their projects, the theory of extimate causality makes clear that it is ineradicable. To imagine otherwise is to be held hostage to a politics of fantasy. As she examines the importance as well as the limitations of theories that put extimate causality to work, Rothenberg reveals how the excess of the subject promises a new theory of social change.
By bringing these prominent thinkers together for the first time in one volume, this landmark text will be sure to ignite debate among scholars in the field, as well as being an indispensable tool for students.
Molly Anne Rothenberg is professor of English at Tulane University. She is a nationally certified psychoanalyst with teaching and scholarly interests that include British literature, gender and sexuality studies and post-Freudian psychoanalytic theory. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Flex Award for research at the University of Edinburgh.
