Reading Seminar XX

<p><b>Examines Lacan's key seminar on sexual difference knowledge desire and love.</b></p><p>This collection offers the first sustained in-depth commentary on Seminar XX Encore considered the cornerstone of Lacan's work on the themes of sexual difference knowledge jouissance and love. Although Seminar XX was originally popularized as Lacan's treatise on feminine sexuality these essays by some of today's foremost Lacanian scholars go beyond feminine sexuality to address Lacan's significant intertwining concern with the rupture between reality and the real produced by modern science and the implications of this rupture for subjectivity knowledge jouissance and the body.</p><p>The essays clarify basic concepts but for readers already familiar with Lacan they also offer sophisticated workings-through of the more challenging and obscure arguments in Encore-both by tracing their historical development across Lacan's œuvre and by demonstrating their relation to particular philosophical theological mathematical and scientific concepts. They cover much of the terrain necessary for understanding sexual difference-not in terms of chromosomes body parts choice of sexual partner or varieties of sexual practice-but in terms of one's position vis-à-vis the Other and the kind of jouissance one is able to obtain. In so doing they make significant interventions in the debates regarding sex gender and sexuality in feminist theory philosophy queer theory and cultural studies.</p>