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Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944
Wartime New York was the city where French Symbolism — Maurice Maeterlinck — came to live out its last productive years; where French surrealism — André Breton — came to survive; and where French structuralism — Claude Lévi-Strauss — came to be born. From the largely forgotten prewar visit to the city of Pétain and Laval to the seizing, burning, and capsizing of the Normandie, France’s floating museum, in the Hudson River, Jeffrey Mehlman evokes the writerly world of French Manhattan, its achievements and feuds, presenting a series of surprising and expertly etched portraits against the backdrop of an overriding irony: the United States, the world’s principal hope in the b...
Adventures in the French Trade
This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar/critic of matters French (and a key figure in the naturalization of French "theory" in English) than a series of differently angled fragments, episodes, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called his amour vache, his injured and occasionally injurious love, for France and the French.
Second Thoughts
George Steiner's discussion of Jeffrey Mehlman's writing on Walter Benjamin gives the flavor of Mehlman's writing in Second Thoughts. "The arch erudition and playful intelligence of Jeffrey Mehlman's concise jeu d'esprit, Walter Benjamin for Children, sparkle. Mehlman weaves a sequence of associative arabesques, 'intertextually imbricated, psychoanalytically informed, ' on the script for two radio programmes for children which Benjamin wrote during 1929-1930. Almost in the style of a magician, Professor Mehlman demonstrates the literally catastrophic substance of Benjamin's tales for children. With a scholastic acuity and wit resembling that of Benjamin himself, Mehlman teases out in the thematic rootedness of catastrophe and fraud the "phantom presence of the motif of a 'false messianism' which flowers, nearly subliminally, in these seemingly innocent broadcasts."
Revolution and Repetition
In Revolution and Repetition, Jeffrey Mehlman surveys the question of the relation between Karl Marx's writings and the institution of literature. He presents not an application of Marxian categories to literary texts, but a delineation of how the phenomenon of revolution in France is refracted through two divergent series of writings. The first comprises three works by Marx: The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, and The Civil War in France. The second consists of two exemplary nineteenth-century novels on revolution: Victor Hugo's Quatrevingt-treize and Honoré de Balzac's Les Chouans. Mehlman also explores the limits and opportunities of readi...
Legacies of Anti-semitism in France
Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France was first published in 1983. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. These four essays—on Blanchot, Lacan, Giraudoux, and Gide—have as their focus the barely imaginable coherence which the writings of four major contemporaries take on when read in the light of France's pre-World War II heritage of anti-Jewish thought. As the essays delve into such crucial topics as the inaugural silence in Blanchot's sense of literature, the "style" of Lacan, Giraudoux's relation to Racine, and the sexual politics of Gid...
Genealogies of the Text
In this book, Jeffrey Mehlman dwells on the series of enigmas surrounding the "Blanchot affair", in which one of the leading figures of contemporary French thought was shown to have been a prominent fascist journalist during the 1930s. Using this as a point of departure, Mehlman investigates the ideological and political connotations of similar literary material, shedding new light on the question of the usability of psychoanalysis for literary readings. The volume provides a provocative meditation on literature, ethics, and the experience of the French in World War II.
Wild Thought
As the most influential anthropologist of his generation, Claude Lévi-Strauss left a profound mark on the development of twentieth-century thought. Through a mixture of insights gleaned from linguistics, sociology, and ethnology, Lévi-Strauss elaborated his theory of structural unity in culture and became the preeminent representative of structural anthropology. La Pensée sauvage, first published in French in 1962, was his crowning achievement. Ranging over philosophies, historical periods, and human societies, it challenged the prevailing assumption of the superiority of modern Western culture and sought to explain the unity of human intellection. Controversially titled The Savage Mind w...
Walter Benjamin for Children
In Walter Benjamin for Children, readers will encounter a host of intertextual surprises: an evocation of the flooding of the Mississippi informed by the argument of "The Task of the Translator"; a discussion of scams in stamp-collecting that turns into "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"; a tale of bootlegging in the American South that converges with the best of Benjamin's forays into fiction. Mehlman superimposes a dual series of texts dealing with catastrophe, on the one hand, and fraud, on the other, and allows it to resonate with the false-messianic theology of Sabbatianism as it came to focus the attention and enthusiasm of Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem during the same years. The radio scripts for children offer an unexpected byway, on the eve of apocalypse, into Benjamin's messianic preoccupations.
Ashes of Immortality
"At last, she arrives at the fatal end of the plank . . . and, with her hands crossed over her chest, falls straight downward, suspended for a moment in the air before being devoured by the burning pit that awaits her. . . ." This grisly 1829 account by Pierre Dubois demonstrates the usual European response to the Hindu custom of satis sacrificing themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands—horror and revulsion. Yet to those of the Hindu faith, not least the satis themselves, this act signals the sati's sacredness and spiritual power. Ashes of Immortality attempts to see the satis through Hindu eyes, providing an extensive experiential and psychoanalytic account of ritual self-sacrifice and self-mutilation in South Asia. Based on fifteen years of fieldwork in northern India, where the state-banned practice of sati reemerged in the 1970s, as well as extensive textual analysis, Weinberger-Thomas constructs a radically new interpretation of satis. She shows that their self-immolation transcends gender, caste and class, region and history, representing for the Hindus a path to immortality.
Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis
Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis paints a completely new picture of the man and his ideas. The book suceeds in showing how ideas can become more accessible, and re-evaluates his significance within the field of psychodynamic psychotherapy. The book is structured thematically around five key issues: diagnosis, the analyst's position during the treatment, the management of transference, the formulation of interpretations, and the organisation of analytic training. For each of these issues, Lacan's entire work both published and unpublished material, has been taken into account and theoretical principles have been illustrated with clinical examples. The book also contains the first complete bibliography of Lacan's works in English. Clear, detailed, and wide ranging, Jacques Lacan and the Freudian Practice of Psychoanalysis will prove essential reading, not only for professionals and students within the fields of psychology and psychiatry, but for all those keen to discover a new Lacan.
