Esoteric Lacan
Esoteric Lacan by Philipp Valentini, published by Bloomsbury Academic on October 18, 2019, is a scholarly exploration of Jacques Lacan’s engagement with various forms of the “religious.” This edition, comprising 246 pages, delves into Lacan’s fascination with monotheism, modern occultism, and non-European religiosities, highlighting his attempts to expand psychoanalytic theory beyond traditional Western frameworks. The anthology features eleven essays that examine Lacan’s interactions with diverse traditions, including Kabbalah and Taoism, and the implications of his search for a new understanding of desire.
Readers will find a critical investigation into the unresolved threads of Lacan’s thought, traversing topics such as gnosticism, sufism, and afro-pessimism. The essays aim to uncover the esoteric dimensions of Lacan’s work, which remain largely unexplored within the conventional psychoanalytic discourse. This collection invites readers to engage with the complexities of Lacan’s theories and the broader philosophical and religious movements that influenced his ideas.
Official synopsis Publisher
Jacques Lacan was fascinated with forms of the “religious” throughout his life, from monotheism, which shaped his account of the signifier, to modern occultism, as he was well acquainted with the writings of figures such as Oskar Goldberg and René Guénon. Lacan also repeatedly turned to non-European religiosities to test the limits of psychoanalytic theory. In his yearly seminars he engaged with traditions such as Kabbalah and Taoism, going beyond the Western Christian, capitalist and postcolonial setting of the French university to search for a possible outside to psychoanalysis. But such a quest ultimately recapitulates Lacan’s constant awareness of the desire for a new master, and the still open question regarding the names and meanings that this desire may yield. This anthology of eleven essays, which travel from gnosticism to sufism, from afro-pessimism to post-68 ex-Maoist apocalypticism, investigates these unresolved threads that Lacan left behind. Beneath the exoteric psychoanalytic apparatus of Lacan’s thought, there is an esoteric Lacan who remains unexplored.
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