Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan

What is love for Sartre and Lacan? In Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan, Sinan Richards examines Sartre’s and Lacan’s writings on love to draw out a distinctly Lacanian conception of love and subjectivity. Richards begins by demonstrating how Sartre’s in itself for itself is a convincing shorthand for Lacan’s central object of study, before presenting and explaining the various aspects of Lacan’s psychophilosophical project to show how, for Lacan, the subject is marked by various pathologies. He argues that, for Lacan, as for Sartre and Schelling before him, the subject is ontologically sick, and, by its very structure, the Oedipus complex produces subjects that are prey to a mental collapse at any moment. As a result, for Lacan, the subject has no choice but to identify with their potential madness, a constitutive aspect of their subjectivity. He concludes by making a compelling case that love in the Lacanian schema is the subject’s mad wish to reunite in itself with for itself, which is an always impossible yet necessary aspect of subjectivity. The book presents fresh insights on Lacan and Sartre that will appeal to students and scholars of psychoanalysis, philosophy, comparative literature and critical theory.

About the Author

Sinan Richards is a British Academy Research Fellow at King’s College London, UK. He is also a member of Centre de recherches interdisciplinaires sur le politique (CRIPOLIS) based at the Université Paris Cité, France. He is currently finishing his next book, Homo Alienatus: Freedom and Psychosis in Lacan and Fanon (Oxford University Press, forthcoming), which will investigate the many overlapping connections between the early Lacan and the young Fanon.