Still Reading

An Interview with Joan Copjec

Authors

  • Joan Copjec
  • Nathan Gorelick

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.2.10

Keywords:

psychoanalysis, feminism, sexual difference, the uncanny, Abbas Kiarostami

Abstract

The following is a retrospective interview with Joan Copjec on her formative 1994 book, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. The interviewer asks Copjec to reflect on the political and academic context surrounding the book’s initial publication, her personal inspiration for writing it as she did, and its enduring relevance after thirty years.

Copjec also situates Read My Desire with respect to her recent work concerning the films of Abbas Kiarostami; the changed cultural and intellectual status of psychoanalysis today; the uncanny dimension of American electoral politics and the unthought fantasies that structure it; and the history of the relation between psychoanalysis and Islam. The interview concludes with some indication of where Copjec’s research, teaching, and writing are headed now and into the future.

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References

Cixous, Hélène. “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s *Das Unheimliche* (The ‘Uncanny’).” Translated by Robert Denommé, revised by Eric Prenowitz. In Volleys of Humanity: Essays 1972–2009, edited by Eric Prenowitz, 15–40. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: Bantam, 1970.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny (1919).” In An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works (1917–1919), edited by James Strachey, 217–56. Vol. 17 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth Press, 1974.

Hyldgaard, Kirsten. Sex Education and Other Pedagogical Impossibilities: Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Sexuality Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2026.

Lauretis, Teresa de. Technologies of Gender: Essays in Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

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Published

2026-01-08

How to Cite

Copjec, J., & Gorelick, N. (2026). Still Reading: An Interview with Joan Copjec. Filozofski Vestnik, 46(2). https://doi.org/10.3986/fv.46.2.10

Issue

Vol. 46 No. 2 (2025): Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, 30 Years On

Section

Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists, 30 Years On

License

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