Lacan : The Silent Partners

Jacques Lacan developed his ideas in dialogue with major European thought and art. Yet what if there is another frame of reference which influenced his thinking and is crucial to its proper understanding? This book focuses on Lacan's "silent partners," those who provide a key to Lacanian theory and discusses his work.

Jacques Lacan is the foremost psychoanalytic theorist after Freud. Revolutionising the study of social relations, his work has been a major influence on political theory, philosophy, literature and the arts, but his thought has so far been studied without a serious investigation of its foundations. Just what are the influences on his thinking, so crucial to its proper understanding?

In Lacan: The Silent Partners Slavoj Žižek, the maverick theorist and pre-eminent Lacan scholar, has marshalled some of the greatest thinkers of our age in support of a dazzling re-evaluation of Lacan’s work. Focussing on Lacan’s ‘silent partners’, those who are the hidden inspiration to Lacanian theory, they discuss his work in relation to the Pre-Socratics, Diderot, Hegel, Nietzsche, Schelling, Hölderlin, Wagner, Turgenev, Kafka, Henry James and Artaud.

This major collection, including three essays by Žižek, marks a new era in the study of this unsettling thinker, breathing new life into his classic work.