Joan Copjec Knihy

In Read My Desire, Joan Copjec stages a confrontation between the theories of Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault, protagonists of two powerful modern discourses - psychoanalysis and historicism. Ordinarily, these discourses only cross paths long enough for historicists to charge psychoanalysis with an indifference to history, but here psychoanalysis, via Lacan, goes on the offensive. Refusing to cede historicity to the historicists, Copjec makes a case for the superiority of Lacan's explanation of historical process, its generative principles, and its complex functionings. Her goal is to inspire a new kind of cultural critique, one that would be "literate in desire, " that would be able to read what is inarticulable in cultural statements.

These essays examine film noir in the light of contemporary social and political concerns, attempting to move beyond the views of the early French critics. Topics range from the re-emergence of noir in films such as Bladerunner, to the relations between the sexes and the role of women.