Since the death of Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche is now considered to be one of the worlds foremost psychoanalytic thinkers. In spite of the influence of his work over the last thirty years, remarkably little has been available in English. Essays On Otherness presents for the first time in English many of Laplanche's key essays and is the first book to provide an overview of his thinking. It offers an introduction to many of the key themes that characterise (...) his work: seduction, persecution, revelation, masochism, transference and mourning. Such themes have been increasingly both in psychoanalytic thought and in continental philosophy, social and cultural theory, and literature making Essays On Otherness indispensable reading for all those concerned with the implications of psychoanalytic theory today. (shrink)

A similar framing of inarticulable formations, of pure multiplicities, marks the respective projects of Deleuze and Laplanche. The absolute exteriority of a disjunctive multiplicity is re-inscribed as a relativised, interiorised trace. This trace-logic of Deleuze and Laplanche has definitive implications where the psychoanalytic subject and the unconscious is concerned. However, there is a difficulty in this logic of accounting for the unconscious formations enumerated by Freud (slips of the tongue, jokes, symptoms etc.). In turning to Lacan, however, the (...) positions of Deleuze and Laplanche can be illuminated (despite their attempt to ‘move beyond’ him). We see the trace in its material, unconscious substantiality upheld by the function of the big Other as an absent centre to which discourse is referred and through which the speaking subject is revealed as being in a discrepant relation to itself. The big Other, in his function as intimate, yet lacking, alterity, seems to help to resolve the problematic of multiplicity for Deleuze and Laplanche. (shrink)

This article critiques Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology in light of psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. I argue that there is a conspicuous absence of the unconscious, sexuality, and fantasy in Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. I turn to the work of Jean Laplanche both to address this absence and to argue for a theory of the formation of sexuality and gender that is not exhausted by the phenomenal world.