"As a psychoanalyst with massive humanistic erudition, Jacques Lacan has a great deal to offer any discipline concerned with the human condition. The Play in the Mirror seeks to bring together some of Lacan's fundamental concepts, primarily from his Ecrits and from Seminars 1, 2, 7, 11, and 20, as well as texts from ten Spanish Baroque comedias that also deal with the human condition." "The Play in the Mirror does not try to psychoanalyze characters, and its scope extends to spectators, readers, and literary critics who are also subject to the same lack, otherness, and desire. In a play, the subjects linked by the mirrors are the author and the spectator, brought together through language and desire through the theatrical performance. All plays and all critical articles are expressions of the desires of the creators. The critical act represents the intersubjective relationship, marked with the misunderstanding, defensiveness, rivalry, and attempts to dominate that characterize all dealings between two subjects. Even in criticism, the desire of the split subject insists." "Throughout the book, the focus is on the more philosophical underpinnings of both discourses. The premodern comedia and Lacan's postmodern perspective seem naturally to inform each other regarding the essential lack at the core of the human subject, the insistence of desire, and the inevitable failure of efforts to establish a unified subject, an orderly society, or a single valid interpretation of a literary text."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved