Lacan and Love - Renata Salecl

"New Formations" is a journal of cultural debate, history and theory. It brings new and challenging perspectives to bear on the categories that frame cultural analysis and political action. The journal has covered issues ranging from the seduction of perversity to questions of nationalism and post-colonialism. Contributors open up new zones of enquiry whilst drawing new charts of understanding to explain new formations in contemporary life.;"New Formations" brings together in one volume both established and new writers from many walks of critical life. Past contributors have included: Parveen Adams, Nomi Bhabha, Slavoj Zizek, Susan Buck-Morss, Gillian Rose, Jacqueline Rose, Zygmunt Bauman and Christopher Norris.;Why does love exist? Lacan's answer to this eternal question is: "because there is no sexual relationship", love is a mirage that fills the void of the impossibility of the relationship between the sexes. This, however, in no way means that love can be reduced to an imaginary phenomenon: beyond the fascination with the image of its object, true love aims at the kernel of the real, at what is in the object more than the object itself, the "objet petit a". Love - as well as hate - is supported by what remains of the object when all the imaginary and symbolic features are annihilated.;This issue of "New Formations" deals with the way this impossibility exists in the cultural products which take sexuality and love as their theme, from Mozart's opera to contemporary romantic film.