As women assert themselves on the world stage and sexual categories multiply, psychoanalysis reveals that the feminine cannot be reduced to biological or cultural data. This book explores the feminine outside of gender and beyond fantasy. From the words of analysands, it extracts some experiences of jouissance.
Female sexuality – the “dark continent” of Freudian psychoanalysis – is a mystery. Marie-Hélène Brousse makes effects of knowledge emerge from this black hole. The void situates an eroticism proper to the feminine, and the author pinpoints Lacan’s move to isolate a jouissance other than phallic: non-localized, unspeakable, infinitely refined.
The feminine is a mode of jouissance that always surprises speaking beings when they experience it, a jouissance out of meaning, out of law, but not outside of body.
The Feminine: A Mode of Jouissance is a publication of the Libretto series. Libretto is the book series of the World Association of Psychoanalysis created in 2021 with Lacanian Press: the first of its kind in English.
It aims at introducing a new presence of what Jacques-Alain Miller has named the “Lacanian Orientation” in the English-speaking world, inviting readers to encounter or re-encounter Lacan’s teaching in a lively and serious way. This teaching, continuously derived from his praxis, offers key concepts for clinicians and practitioners.
The Libretto book series will be a central reference point for anybody wishing to engage with Lacanian psychoanalysis which privileges a constantly renewed interpretation of the world we inhabit.
World Association of Psychoanalysis: www.wapol.org
Lacanian Press: www.lacaniancompass.com
