This collection, written by leading Lacanian psychoanalytic theorists and practitioners, is a unique exploration of the novel aspects of perversion from the perspective of cruelty—a psychoanalytic study that has never been sufficiently undertaken in an English-speaking world. Instead of reducing the notion of perversion to cultural representations, a historical discourse or a clinical diagnosis, the authors in this collection draw on Freud, Kant, Hegel, Marquis de Sade, Derrida, Deleuze and Žižek to untie the knot of “psychic cruelty” intrinsic to perversion and therefore “de-sexualize” perverted acts. They do so by theorizing perversion in psychoanalytic concepts of the Oedipus complex, the-Name-of-the-Father and jouissance, and furthermore in the perspective of the clinics of neurosis and psychosis, in dialogue with a clinical praxis, philosophy and literature.

This book uses clinical psychoanalytic theory to illustrate how early British Gothic fiction reveals undercurrents of psychopathological behavior. It demonstrates that psychological insights gained from Gothic romance anticipate the later scientific findings of psychoanalysis. Chapters consider the division of the Gothic novel's critical reception between allegory and romance; how the structure of early British Gothic romance parallels Freud's notion of the uncanny; the genre's perverse origins in Walpole's The Castle of Otranto; sexual differentiation and the parallel between development of Gothic romance an development of the psyche; Ann Radcliffe and the terror of hysteria; Matthew Lewis and obsessional neurosis; and the confusion between self and other in Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

'Lacan Deleuze Badiou' guides us through the crucial, under-remarked interrelations between these three thinkers, identifying the conceptual passages, connections and disjunctions that underlie the often superficial statements of critique, indifference or

Redirecting examinations of the culture of the city away from its customs, art, and amenities to focus on the mental life of modern society, Alan Blum explores the methods cities and their subjects use to find meaning in the context of urban life, in particular the city’s relationships to social change and what has traditionally been identified as justice. The Material City pictures the city as a landscape of diverse clashes over beliefs, a site that exhibits interpretive collisions over globalization, gentrification, innovation, preservation, market value, popular culture, crowds, consumption, urban governance, and different strategies for healing the democratic city’s ever-present conflicts over these concerns. Each chapter uses a problem of urban life to observe and analyze assumptions and values that are typically taken for granted and unspoken, using elements of the philosophy of Plato as well as the work of modern thinkers such as Georg Simmel, Gertrude Stein, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Lacan. The Material City translates contested views of everyday life and its management into a deeper reflection on urbanity as a system of desire. The historical and the contemporary metropolis alike are shown to be sites where the enigma of mortality – and its relation to pleasure, comedy, and fate – plays out.

Recent literary expressions of the immigrant experience reveal the postmodern narrative obsession with the immigrant as cultural and political outlier. Wretched Refuge: Immigrants and Itinerants in the Postmodern asks us to reimagine this preoccupation with what Junot Diaz calls the “actual flows of third world bodies” as part of a larger, more pertinent motif of the postmodern itinerant. As a figure of cultural becoming, the itinerant stands for displacement and dispersion, exceeding the confines of physical location, political subjectivity, and relation to the natural world. Thus, Wretched Refuge seeks to map the cosmopolitan positionalities of an immigrant or exilic experience: the itinerant, the migrant, and other “foreign” bodies. The essays in Wretched Refuge consider fiction, memoir, and pop-culture genres that reconceive time, space, and the shifting situatedness of the subject within nature, politics, and culture. The book weaves together modern and postmodern visions of itinerancy in the writings of Cormac McCarthy, Bob Dylan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Roberto Bolaño, Paul Bowles, and Bill McKibben, among others. Throughout these radically different narratives, the trace of the itinerant suggests a cosmopolitan response to localized anxieties about global hegemony.

This volume offers a sample of reflections from scholars and practitioners on the theme of death and dying from scholars and practitioners, ranging from the Christian tradition to Hinduism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, while also touching on the themes of the afterlife and near-death experiences.