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Published online: 16 March 2023
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2023
Lacan and Critical Feminism attempts to blend Lacan’s theory of discourse with his graph of sexuation in order to offer a palpable and effective feminist ethics that will be both acceptable to feminist theory currently resistant to Lacanian psychoanalysis and relevant to today’s world of flexible gender identification and fluid sexualities. The new ethics that the text advocates results from a quarter-turn rotation of the graph of sexuation, much in the manner of the four discourses, but also from treating seriously the hysteric’s resistance to the master signifier within the theory of discourse, a resistance that exposes the phallic signifier’s contingency. The text hopes to “push back … the current emphasis on gender within the phallic apparatus” (p. 69), an emphasis from which much current feminism still suffers.
The text is organized around four major sections, bracketed by “short interruptions,” which the author “cheekily call[s] quilting points” (p. 9). These “quilting points,” as the reader will surmise, act as punctuating interpretations of contemporary literary and cinematic texts and are designed to illustrate the immediately succeeding theoretical chapters. Even though Lacan and critical feminism is avowedly feminist in its agenda, these “quilting points” intentionally, and only seemingly paradoxically, focus on texts that have been created by male authors (Lars von Trier, Quentin Tarantino, David Foster Wallace, Slavoj Žižek) who often have been under scrutiny and “subjected to cancel culture” (p. 8) for various misogynist offenses. One includes a lengthy and thought-provoking examination of the later films of David Lynch, another cis-male artist whom the author explicitly exempts from including within the same misogynist grouping. Carusi strategically relies on texts by these men to reveal evidence of “anti-masculinist narratives” (p. 8) within the seemi