You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Based on a seminar recorded in 2001/2002 in Paris, Humain/Déshumain [Human/Unhuman] constitutes one of Pierre Fédida's last elaborations of his work. First published in 2007, it is reprinted in this volume along with eight psychoanalytical articles by other authors who take it as their point of departure, authors whose thoughts have helped refine the following review:
Jacques André, La Mort dans l'âme [Sick at Heart]; Monique Schneider, La Disparition féminine [Feminine Disappearance]; Vincent Estellon, Écouter, interpréter avec Pierre Fédida [Listening and Interpreting with Pierre Fédida]; Michel Gribinski, Les Scènes indésirables [Undesirable Scenes]; Daniel Widlöcher, Une Esthétique du dissemblable [An Aesthetic of the Dissimilar]; Corinne Ehrenberg, La Mort entre les jambes [Death between the Legs]; Dominique Scarfone, Seul ce qui est humain peut nous être étranger [Only the Human Can be Foreign to Us]; Marieke Wolf-Fédida, Faire et défaire [Doing and Undoing].
Human/Unhuman is a text that does two things at once, for it extends the main psychoanalytical themes informing Pierre Fédida's thought (absence; psychoanalytic treatment as a locus of foreignness; crisis and countertransference; the resort to regression) while at the same time constituting a turning-point that upsets our theoretical and practical assumptions and startles us with the audacity of its metapsychological imaginativeness and its complexity. For Fédida makes the uncanny—a defining and essential aspect of the psychoanalytical experience, of the practice and theorization of that experience and of its written record—into a feature of the actual conduct of analysis. A first notable characteristic of Fédida's text is the use of terms that do not appear really to represent Freudian concepts: human/unhuman; process of the unhuman; loss of the fellow-human [le semblable]; fellow-human/alien other [semblable/dissemblable]; disappearance/appearance—terminology that r