Male Subjectivity at the Margins

In Male Subjectivity at the Margins Kaja Silverman provides a feminist and psychoanalytic reading of a variety of masculinities which fall outside the phallic pale -- masculinities which defy the logic of paternal succession, and which in doing so might be said to say 'no' to power. Since the forms of male subjectivity which most centrally concern Silverman are those which occupy a psychic space which has been traditionally defined as 'feminine', this book is also an extended investigation into the category of 'femininity'. Male Subjectivity at the Margins makes a concerted attempt to elaborate a 'libidinal politics'. It argues that desire and identification always have important political consequences and implications, enabling certain actions and alliances, and legislating against others. Silverman engages a wide assortment of theoretical, cinematic and literary texts, ranging from Lacan's Seminar XI, Freud's essays on masochism, and Leo Bersani's 'Is the Rectum a Grave?', to the films of Fassbinder, and the writings of Proust and T.E. Lawrence. In doing so, she thinks ideology, masochism, authorship, and the gaze, and offers an extended consideration of racial and class masquerade. Silverman reconceives what it might mean to describe a certain kind of homosexual man as 'a woman's soul enclosed in a man's body'. She also proposes a new model for historical analysis, one predicated upon Freud's theory of trauma. Male Subjectivity at the Margins will be of interest, not only to readers concerned with issues of gender, but to film scholars, literary critics and theorists, and those working within the areas of psychoanalytic theory, gay studies, cultural studies, and postcolonialism. Kaja Silverman is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of The Subject of Semiotics and The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.