Description
Book SynopsisIn groundbreaking readings linking works of Descartes, Shakespeare, and Cervantes with contemporary revisions of Freud and Nietzsche, Unspeakable Subjects argues that the concepts and discourses that have come to define European modernitythe subject''s extension and responsibility, genealogies of intention and of freedom, the literary, legal, and medical construction of the body, among othersarise as strategies for evading a profound redefinition of the nature of events in early modern Europe.
Negotiating the often competing claims of rhetorical reading and cultural analysis, Lezra reassesses the grounds of literary and philosophical history as a materialist practice of eventful reading. His original accounts of Don Quixote, Descartes''s Second Meditation and Regulae, and Measure for Measure tack between linguistic, psychoanalytic, and cultural materialist approaches to define and discuss the double aspect of the event in early modern
Trade Review
"What one sees in Unspeakable Subjects is Jacques Lezra's uniquely personal conjugation of theoretical interests with the resisting pressures of history, literary history, and philology. I find no convenient label to describe his brand of reading, but I strongly suspect that he will be one of the critics who redefines and rehistoricizes literary theory in the coming decades. Lezra is, to my mind, one of the most gifted intellects of his generation of literary scholars." -- Mary Malcolm Gaylord * Harvard University *
"The range of Lezra's admirable work is immense, but so is the historical scholarship. Context is never lost from view; apparent anachronisms turn out to afford brilliant reflections on the complicated temporality of reading. Unspeakable Subjects does not seek to understand, not does it seek a licence for the contemporary critic to say whatever he/she pleases. It asks what has become of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Descartes in our hands, and it shows, in devastating detail and often with considerable wit, how much of us was already in the texts of those early writers." -- Michael Wood, Straut Professor of English * Princeton University *
Table of Contents
Introduction: eventful reading; 1. Freud's sickle; 2. The ontology of the letter in Descartes's second meditation; 3. The matter of naming in Don Quixote; 4. Cervantes' hand; 5. The appearance of history in Measure for Measure; Notes; Bibliography; Index.
