Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation by way of Joan Copjec The MIT Press/261 pp/$2995 (hb) Joan Copjec's latest work takes its beginnings from Jacques Lacan's infamous proposition regarding female sexuality: "the Woman does not exist.

Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation by way of Joan Copjec

The MIT Press/261 pp/$2995 (hb)

Joan Copjec's latest work takes its beginnings from Jacques Lacan's infamous proposition regarding female sexuality: "the Woman does not exist." Far from being simply a revisionist body Imagine There's No Woman is an explosive retextualization of the Freudian universal of sublimation through the ideas of Lacan. Copjec starts with contemporary place theory and then blazes a wide trail by means of the wake of over 200 years of pondering Each argument is intelligently paired with a work of art for illustration, including of the like kind diverse pieces as Kara Walker's silhouettes, Cindy Sherman's film stills, and the film noir classic Laura.

on the contrary it is this virtue that is also the book's shortcoming. In her adroitness at combining a wide variety of discourses, Copjec frequently bogs down her arguments with too many particulars. The final chapter of the part "What Zapruder Saw," begins on contrasting Abraham Zapruder's famous in extent footage of the Kennedy assassination with Pier Paolo Pasolini's pro-montage essay "Observations in succession the Long Take." Through a dab expansion of the cinematic conceptions of "the Gaze" and "the Other" she links together these seemingly oppositional ideas of objective shooting and relegates the viewpoints to common another. The intelligence of this argument, however, is obscur by means of the rest of the chapter, which embarks in succession an extended analysis of Pasolini's Salo and the part of the pervert in Sade, Sartre, Freud Lacan, and Kant. Although the claims she posits are insightful and fascinating, and share a tough linkage to the revisions she imagined for Zapruder and Pasolini, the sheer amount of information she assimilates into her argument is overwhelming and confusing.

It is clear from this thesis that Jean Copjec is the heir apparent to American Lacanism. The inventiveness and plasticity of her feminist rethinking is a piece of good fortune to the typically misogynist establishment of psychotherapy. Sadly, it is this same bias that often obscures the clarity of her intent.

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