Book Review Essay: “Anorexia, Jouissance, and the Contemporary Clinic” A Review of Domenico Consenza’s “A Lacanian Reading of Anorexia”

Abstract

This essay offers a selective engagement with Domenico Cosenza’s A Lacanian Reading of Anorexia, newly translated into English by Jonathan West and revised by Fernando Castrillón. Rather than providing a comprehensive overview, this text reflects on a few key threads that highlight the richness of Cosenza’s contribution to contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Cosenza’s work is a rigorous and clinically grounded exploration of anorexia, drawing from extensive theoretical research and his own vast clinical experience. The book revisits historical understandings of the disorder and situates anorexia within the Lacanian field as a structurally significant phenomenon—one marked by opacity, holophrasis, and a refusal of the Other through an enigmatic interplay with “nothingness’ that unveils anorexia, beyond metaphor, as a conduit for jouissance. Far from being a mere disorder of appetite, anorexia becomes, in Cosenza’s formulation, a paradigmatic symptom that speaks to our clinical present. It reflects the transformations within subjectivity under very late capitalism, where the symbolic law no longer serves as a regulating structure the body presents itself as the channel both for regulation and inscription. In this sense, Cosenza positions anorexia as an “Ur-symptom” of our time—one that stages the broader crisis of the symbolic order and calls for a re-elaboration of classical clinical coordinates in order to ethically engage with today’s subjectivities, which often attempt—desperately—to cohere within the very symptom that threatens to undo them.

Keywords:

• anorexia Keyword: anorexia
• jouissance Keyword: jouissance
• object nothing Keyword: object nothing
• Lacan Keyword: Lacan
• clinic of the realanorexia Keyword: clinic of the realanorexia
• clinic of the real Keyword: clinic of the real

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Rights: In Copyright