Cixous, Derrida, Psychoanalysis

This book considers the different ways psychoanalysis is of immense importance to the work of Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Psychoanalysis is of immense importance in different ways to Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida. Bringing together original essays by leading contemporary thinkers in literary theory and continental philosophy, including a contribution by Cixous herself, this volume explores the place of psychoanalysis in their work. It has a double focus: both on the complex 'treatment' to which psychoanalysis is subjected by Jacques Derrida and Helene Cixous, and on the role of psychoanalytical concepts and insights in the extraordinary intellectual dialogue that united these two groundbreaking authors over several decades. Psychoanalysis remains an enigmatic discourse for the humanities: on the one hand inextricable from and in many ways constitutive of much of modern thinking, yet on the other hand violently contested, from within and without. The essays in this volume consider this situation through two thinkers whose work challenges and radicalises psychoanalytic thinking in unprecedented ways.