The Other Side of Desire: Lacan's Theory of the Registers

The other Side of Desire puts Jacques Lacan's theoretical constructs to work on texts as varied as Plato's Symposium, Hamlet, Tootsie, and the journals of Sylvia Plath, making the techniques of Lacanian analysis accessible to a wide variety of readers. Moving from oppositional readings of Lacan himself, through Lacan's search for an alternative to oppositionality, to his solution in the theory of the registers, Van Pelt rereads Lacan's most significant essays on aggressivity, the mirror stage, the subversion of the subject, and the signification of the phallus, making explicit the reading practices implicit in Lacan's first seven Seminars and his Ecrits. Throughout, Van Pelt demonstrates Lacanian theory's pivotal role in the intellectual transition from the post-structuralism of the mid-twentieth century to the post-humanism of the twenty-first.

Tamise Van Pelt is Assistant Professor of English at Idaho State University.