SOURCE: Mitrano, Mena. “Psychoanalysis and the Moth.” College Literature 27, no. 2 (spring 2000): 201-06.

In the following essay, Mitrano compares Cogito and the Unconscious with Tobin Siebers's The Subject and Other Subjects, emphasizing how each work addresses theories of philosophy and politics.

In a recent seminar, philosopher Maurizio Ferraris remarked that our epoch is thoroughly aestheticized. Cogito and the Unconscious, the new collection of essays on Lacanian psychoanalysis edited by Slavoj Zizek, speaks to this aestheticization with the image of a subject beating like a moth against the windowpane of a social code s/he seeks to renew. This assessment is not very different from the Lacan-inspired account of subjectivity Julia Kristeva offered more than twenty years ago. At that time, to make up for linguistics' failure to apprehend “anything in language which belongs not with the social contract but with play, pleasure or desire” (26), Kristeva invented semanalysis, a procedure...