Eros in Mourning: From Homer to Lacan
Eros in Mourningsituates Jacques Lacan in the thanatoerotophobic tradition of misogyny. Luminous and erudite textual-historical analyses ofthe European tradition from Homer to Conrad perform the task. On this trajectory, Staten opens up Plato and Courtly Love,HamletandParadiseLost, Dante and Madame de Lafayette in new ways. A compelling and brilliant book.(Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)At the end of Henry Staten's breathtakingEros in Mourningwe are left to stare blindly into the awesome face of that which is said to transfix the canonical avatars of Western man from the grieving hero Akhilleus (Achilles) in Homer'sIliadto the death-driven psychoanalyst inThe Seminar of Jacques Lacan... A splendid series of readings.(Steven Z. LevineBryn Mawr Classical Review)Staten is at his most astonishing when he illustrates how texts that on the manifest level appear to advocate an idealizing preservation of the self, on a latent one advocate a radical embrace of mortality and an absolute expenditure of the self.(Elisabeth BronfenModern Language Review)Each chapter is a tour de force of its own. The chapter on Christianity alone, with its extraordinary Nietzschean affirmation of the figure of Christ, tells more than a whole bag of the usual cultural studies! If you did not read this book, don't say you were not warned what you are missing!(Slavoj Zizek, Institute for Social Studies, Ljubljana, Slovenia)Eros in Mourningis a brilliant, precisely, powerfully, and passionately argued analysis of the structure of mourning fundamental to Western transcendental thinking. Staten is a superb reader, engaging us in levels of his texts that make it clear why they earned canonical status.(Charles Altieri, University of California, Berkeley)Eros in Mourningoffers the groundwork for a new poetics, which we can confidently call a poetics of mourning.(Cultural Critique)