Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

In this unique collection, Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub examine the nature and function of memory and the act of witnessing, both in their general relation to the acts of writing and reading, and in their particular relation to the Holocaust. Moving from the literary to the visual, from the artistic to the autobiographical, and from the psychoanalytic to the historical, the book defines for the first time the trauma of the Holocaust as a radical crisis of witnessing "the unprecedented historical occurrence of...an event eliminating its own witness." Through the alternation of a literary and clinical perspective, the authors focus on the henceforth modified relation between knowledge and event, literature and evidence, speech and survival, witnessing and ethics.

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History

Literature & Fiction

Felman, Shoshana

Laub, Dori

Literary

Routledge

The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century

Death, wrote Walter Benjamin, lends storytellers all their authority. How do trials, in turn, borrow their authority from death? This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice.  Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically "expressionless."  Examining legal events that tried to repair the crimes and injuries of history, Felman reveals the "juridical unconscious" of trials and brilliantly shows how this juridical unconscious is bound up with the logic of the trauma that a trial attempts to articulate and contain but so often reenacts and repeats. Her book gives the drama of the law a new jurisprudential dimension and reveals the relation between law and literature in a new light.

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

Death, wrote Walter Benjamin, lends storytellers all their authority. How do trials, in turn, borrow their authority from death? This book offers a groundbreaking account of the surprising interaction between trauma and justice. 
Moving from texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Freud, Zola, and Tolstoy to the Dreyfus and Nuremberg trials, as well as the trials of O. J. Simpson and Adolf Eichmann, Shoshana Felman argues that the adjudication of collective traumas in the twentieth century transformed both culture and law. This transformation took place through legal cases that put history itself on trial, and that provided a stage for the expression of the persecuted--the historically "expressionless."
Examining legal events that tried to repair the crimes and injuries of history, Felman reveals the "juridical unconscious" of trials and brilliantly shows how this juridical unconscious is bound up with the logic of the trauma that a trial attempts to articulate and contain but so often reenacts and repeats. Her book gives the drama of the law a new jurisprudential dimension and reveals the relation between law and literature in a new light.

Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential and controversial French thinkers of the twentieth century, was a practicing and teaching psychoanalyst in Paris, but his revolutionary seminars on Freud reached out far beyond professional circles: they were enthusiastically attended by writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from many disciplines. 
 Shoshana Felman elucidates the power and originality of Lacan's work. She brilliantly analyzes Lacan's investigation of psychoanalysis not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery. By focusing on Lacan's singular way of making Freud's thought new again--and of thus enabling us to participate in the very moment of intellectual struggle and insight--Felman shows how this moment of illumination has become crucial to contemporary thinking and has redefined insight as such. This book is a groundbreaking statement not only on Lacan but on psychoanalysis in general. 
 Felman argues that, contrary to popular opinion, Lacan's preoccupation is with psychoanalytic practice rather than with theory for its own sake. His true clinical originality consists not in the incidental innovations that separate his theory from other psychoanalytic schools, but in the insight he gives us into the structural foundations of what is common to the practice of all schools: the transference ation and the psychoanalytic dialogue. In chapters on Poe's tale "The Purloined Letter"; Sophocles' Oedipus plays, a case report by Melanie Klein, and Freud's writings, Felman demonstrates Lacan's ediscovery of these texts as renewed and renewable intellectual adventures and as parables of the psychoanalytic encounter. The book explores these questions: How and why does psychoanalytic practice work? What accounts for clinical success? What did Freud learn from the literary Oedipus, and how does Freud text take us beyond Oedipus? How does psychoanalysis inform, and radically displace, our conception of what learning is and of what reading is? 
 This book will be an intellectual event not only for clinicians and literary critics, but also for the broader audience of readers interested in contemporary thought.

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

Jacques Lacan, one of the most influential and controversial French thinkers of the twentieth century, was a practicing and teaching psychoanalyst in Paris, but his revolutionary seminars on Freud reached out far beyond professional circles: they were enthusiastically attended by writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and intellectuals from many disciplines.
Shoshana Felman elucidates the power and originality of Lacan’s work. She brilliantly analyzes Lacan’s investigation of psychoanalysis not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery. By focusing on Lacan’s singular way of making Freud’s thought new again―and of thus enabling us to participate in the very moment of intellectual struggle and insight―Felman shows how this moment of illumination has become crucial to contemporary thinking and has redefined insight as such. This book is a groundbreaking statement not only on Lacan but on psychoanalysis in general.
Felman argues that, contrary to popular opinion, Lacan’s preoccupation is with psychoanalytic practice rather than with theory for its own sake. His true clinical originality consists not in the incidental innovations that separate his theory from other psychoanalytic schools, but in the insight he gives us into the structural foundations of what is common to the practice of all schools: the transference action and the psychoanalytic dialogue. In chapters on Poe’s tale “The Purloined Letter”; Sophocles’s Oedipus plays, a case report by Melanie Klein, and Freud’s writings, Felman demonstrates Lacan’s rediscovery of these texts as renewed and renewable intellectual adventures and as parables of the psychoanalytic encounter. The book explores these questions: How and why does psychoanalytic practice work? What accounts for clinical success? What did Freud learn from the literary Oedipus, and how does Freud text take us beyond Oedipus? How does psychoanalysis inform, and radically displace, our conception of what learning is and of what reading is?
This book will be an intellectual event not only for clinicians and literary critics, but also for the broader audience of readers interested in contemporary thought.

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Writing and Madness is Shoshana Felman's most influential work of literary theory and criticism. Exploring the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through brilliant studies of Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, and James, as well as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, this book seeks the specificity of literature in its relation to what culture excludes under the label "madness." Why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the madman, and how does this reclaiming reveal something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge?
Every literary text continues to communicate with madness-with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable, or senseless-by dramatizing a dynamically revitalized relation between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, the readable and the unreadable. This revelation of the irreducibility of the relation between the readable and the unreadable constitutes what the author calls la chose littéraire-the literary thing.

Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis)

Cornell Univ Pr

The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan With J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (English and French Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Writing and Madness is Shoshana Felman's most influential work of literary theory and criticism. Exploring the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through brilliant studies of Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, and James, as well as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, this book seeks the specificity of literature in its relation to what culture excludes under the label "madness." Why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the madman, and how does this reclaiming reveal something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge?
Every literary text continues to communicate with madness—with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable, or senseless—by dramatizing a dynamically revitalized relation between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, the readable and the unreadable. This revelation of the irreducibility of the relation between the readable and the unreadable constitutes what the author calls la chose littéraire—the literary thing.

Cornell University Press

What does a woman want? -the question Freud famously formulated in a letter to Marie Bonaparte-is a quintessentially male question that arises from women's resistance to their place in a patriarchal society. But what might it mean, asks Shoshana Felman, for a woman to reclaim this question as her own? Can this question engender, through the literary or the psychoanalytic work, a woman's voice as its speaking subject? Felman explores these questions through close readings of autobiographical texts by Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Adrienne Rich which attempt to redefine women as the subject of their own desire. "Shoshana Felman is a reader of unparalleled subtlety". -Marjorie Garber, Harvard University.

What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference

Johns Hopkins University Press

Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, Calif.) )

Writing and Madness is Shoshana Felman's most influential work of literary theory and criticism. Exploring the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis through brilliant studies of Balzac, Nerval, Flaubert, and James, as well as Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida, this book seeks the specificity of literature in its relation to what culture excludes under the label "madness." Why and how do literary writers reclaim the discourse of the madman, and how does this reclaiming reveal something essential about the relation between literature and power, as well as between literature and knowledge? Every literary text continues to communicate with madness—with what has been excluded, decreed abnormal, unacceptable, or senseless—by dramatizing a dynamically revitalized relation between sense and nonsense, reason and unreason, the readable and the unreadable. This revelation of the irreducibility of the relation between the readable and the unreadable constitutes what the author calls la chose littéraire—the literary thing.

Martha Noel Evans

Stanford University Press

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Books by Felman, Shoshana

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Felman, Shoshana. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History

The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century

The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis)

The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan With J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages (English and French Edition)

Writing and Madness (Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis)

What Does a Woman Want?: Reading and Sexual Difference

Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford, Calif.) )