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.
The author of this book is a professor of French at the University of California, Irvine. She has produced what is essentially an academic exercise heavily larded with jargon and groaning under the weight of a number of clumsy sentences as, “In the case of the difference between the sexes, the dialectic is also interrupted, however, and, once again, not by something radically other—in this case, by a form of (feminine) sexuality that could be absolutely opposed to the dominant (masculine) form of sexuality” (p. 7). There is little effort to define some of the most difficult terms that she uses, and readers are required to have considerable background and expertise in psychoanalysis, philosophy, and French drama as well as the standard works of such theorists as Lessing, Benjamin, Auerbach, and Lacoue-Labarthe, among many others. This work will be of no interest to the practicing psychoanalyst or clinician. In fact, the author seems to identify the word “psychoanalysis” with the writings of Freud and the word “philosophy,” or at least “speculative philosophy,” with the writings of Hegel. She takes for granted that Hegel's discredited formal dialectic method in philosophy is worthwhile introducing as the logical foundation of her argument in the book.