The Life and Death of Psychoanalysis

'Jamieson Webster's reflections on psychoanalysis have a crystal clarity. As a writer, she introduces us time and again to the moment that inaugurates desire, including the desire for psychoanalysis. Her paragraphs move in a set of careful sequences that call into question their own possibility, registering at every juncture the seriality and detours of desire itself, a desire registered in psychoanalytic theory and practice, but also, clearly, in the practice of reading itself. Although she deftly and economically recapitulates the major philosophical questions implied by psychoanalytic practice, she also shows us why and how they dawn on us, what captures our attention, and what remains enigmatic. In this way, we are solicited to read with her, to follow a set of paths with no one outcome, and so to move away from dogmatic conceptions of psychoanalysis to an embodied and relational encounter with texts and the persistent and opaque desires they register. With great conceptual lucidity and argumentative edge, Webster brings us close to that passionate knowledge that is psychoanalysis and that defies every systematization.'- Judith Butler, author of Giving an Account of Oneself and Undoing Gender'This unique book shows us how psychoanalytic writing can be reinvented. Neither traditional academic discourse nor clinical case, it pursues the question of desire through a perpetual process of unbalancing the boundary we might expect between form and content. Thought-provoking, unnerving, and spunky, it will interest anyone working in the field of psychoanalysis.'- Darian Leader, author of The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression