Customer Reviews

Eros in Mourning: From Homer to Lacan

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I am something of a fan of Staten's work. I am a former U of U English graduate student, and so I have had the pleasure of sitting in a Staten course on Lacan and Derrida. I also recommend his U of Nebraska text on Derrida and Wittgenstein.

This is a deep and evocative book. For anyone interested in literary theory and criticism (namely dealing with Lacan or Derrida), I highly recommend this book. I also recommend the work of Borch-Jacobsen and H. Adams, among others.

The most interesting material here is on Dante, Hamlet, and the Lacan chapter. The book is highly interesting and thought-provoking from beginning to end.

I am a Nietzschean, and came to know of Staten via the formidable
"Nietzsche's Voice".
"Eros in Mourning" deals with the pervasiveness of the (post-Homeric) Platonic and Christian disapproval of full attachment to any mortal being; with the fear and suffering that keep this ideology alive and relevant, and with the costs involved in adhering to such an ideology. It is, overtly academic in appearance, and pursues the "dialectics of
mourning", (rather than mourning, as such), at the centre of various canonical western texts, culminating in Lacan. Essentially the book is about transcendence and whether we can really do without it, or whether we are capable of a dionysian perspective.