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Jamieson Webster

Teoksen Stay, Illusion!: The Hamlet Doctrine tekijä

4 teosta 109 jäsentä 3 arvostelua

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Jamieson Webster argues that the life and death of psychoanalysis hinges on the question of desire itself, bringing this question back to the center of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Pursued through her own relation to the field, she recounts the story of her training through the näytä lisää interpretation of three significant dreams, as well as her encounter with three thinkers for whom the problem of psychoanalysis remains crucial: Adorno, Lacan, and Badiou. In blurring the line between the personal and the theoretical, this book explores how one, through the difficult work of transference and reading, can live out the life of desire that tests the very limits of what it means to be human. näytä vähemmän

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Hamlet is bereft of his desire, cannot act, and all the objects that surround him are degraded and rendered fungible: women are whores; stepfathers are liars; mothers are criminals; the world is rotten and putrefying.

My impressions of this text were very up and down, mostly down. That response wedges open a question as to what were my expectations. Most simply, I went to the text for Simon Critchley. He has been brilliant rel="nofollow" target="_top">https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11538399-the-faith-of-the-faithless but has recently disappointed me, his pop ruminations on mortality proved rather annoying. So Critchley and his wife Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst, penned this swarm of brief essays on Hamlet. Too coy to be simply analytical, instead Stay, Illusion! scampers about from approach to approach, fingering the pulse of Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Freud and Lacan for their takes on Prince of Denmark and fomenting a crackle and foam of hogwash. Do weed further Hamlet theorizing? Should married couples collaborate on authorship? Why the FUCK, was Derrida's Spectres of Marx not mentioned?

There is a later echo devoted to Joyce and Bataille, but the damage had already been inflicted. Ophelia is the hero of the play, akin to Antigone but more pungent and sexual. Politics do matter critically/contextually, as a free association between Gertrude and Mary Queen of Scots couldn't be allowed to hatch on stage. I'm curious what Melville would've though of that explanation.… (lisätietoja)
 
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jonfaith | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Feb 22, 2019 |
Simon Critchley is a professor of philosophy and husband to his co-author, Jamieson Webster, a New York psychoanalyst. Both have published in their own fields but this book on Hamlet is a new venture which they describe in their introduction as 'the late flowering fruit of a shared obsession'. That mangled metaphor - fruit don't flower - is fair warning that one should not expect too much in the way of clarity or linguistic precision from Critchley and Webster. What they do promise, as amateurs in Shakespearean criticism, is an 'outsider's' reading of the play and a 'rash' interpretation of its mysteries. Cariola, so far the only other reviewer for Librarything, is scathing about the book, describing it as 'pretentious' and self indulgent. That may be a little unfair: the authors do give fair warning of what to expect and they are disarming in their shared determination to proceed rashly at the risk of 'completely betraying ourselves'.
Critchley and Webster come to Hamlet with extensive learning in their own disciplines of philosophy and psychoanalysis. Hamlet is subjected to readings drawn from Freud, Lacan, Benjamin, Hegel and Nietzsche, among others. Some chapters were virtually unintelligible to me. Others were unexpectedly penetrating, the Nietzschean readings in particular. There is quite a lot of fun to be had reading 'Stay Illusion', which should balance the times when you throw the book across the room in irritation or disgust.
… (lisätietoja)
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Pauntley | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jun 30, 2015 |
This is one of the most unjustifiably pretentious books on Shakespeare that I've read in a long time. While the cover blurb promises "a passionate encounter with the play [Hamlet] that affords an original look at this work of literature and the prismatic quality of the play to project meaning," the authors say little that hasn't been said before--many times. Yet they present each stale observation as if it were an original--and brilliant--insight. Since one is a philosopher and the other a psychoanalyst, they throw Freud, Hegel, Benjamin, Plato, Nietzsche, Gorgias, Lacan and others into the mix. This may be of interest to some readers, but I found that these discussions often just bogged things down in a display of pedantry.

The book is divided into five parts, each consisting of a number of short essays (2-6 pages) with titles that connect to the play with specific lines ("Get Thee to a Nunnery"), cutesiness ("Psychoanalysts Eat Their Young," "O, O, O, O. Dies."), or a desire to shock ("Gertrude, a Gaping Cunt"). These may tell you all you really need to know. Obviously the effort here has been to out-Freud Freud's analysis of Hamlet, and the authors seem quite impressed with their own results.

While the book may hold interest for some readers, I'm a Shakespearean, and it did nothing to enhance my understanding of the play or concepts for teaching it.
… (lisätietoja)
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Cariola | 2 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Jun 16, 2013 |

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Teokset
4
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109
Suosituimmuussija
#178,011
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½ 2.6
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3
ISBN:t
13

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