Still Reading

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.