ABSTRACT
The Regime of the Brother is one of the first attempts to challenge modernity on its own terms. Using the work of Lacan, Kristeva and Freud, Juliet MacCannell confronts the failure of modernity to bring about the social equality promised by the Enlightenment. On the verge of its destruction, the Patriarchy has reshaped itself into a new, and often more oppressive regime: that of the Brother.
Examining a range of literary and social texts - from Rousseau's Confessions to Richardson's Clarissa and from Stendhal's De L'Amour to James's What Maisie Knew and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea - MacCannell illustrates a history of the suppression of women, revealing the potential for a specifically feminine alternative.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter |6 pages
Introduction: the structure of the book
part I|34 pages
The theory and history of the Regime of the Brother
chapter 1|22 pages
The primal scene of modernity
chapter 2|10 pages
Modernity as the absence of the other: the general self
part II|83 pages
Readings in the Regime of the Brother
chapter 3|42 pages
Egomimesis
chapter 4|39 pages
Feminine Eros: from the bourgeois state to the nuclear state
part III|59 pages
The end(s) of love in the western world