The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (review)

Sartre in Search for a Method (1960) famously asserted that Marxism was the “untranscendable horizon” of all modern intellectual work. Today, despite frequent repudiations of the self-congratulatory announcements of the death of dialectical materialism, few could accept Sartre’s lapidary pronouncement. It seems only too clear that, far from providing the basic architecture of contemporary thought, Marxism must fight on a daily basis to maintain its continuing relevance to a world in which the struggle against the commodification of even the most intimate recesses of daily life has fallen more and more to socially marginal and fundamentalist forces rather than the vanguard of the working class. In a world, however, where videotaped beheadings, performed in the name of a transcendental father, are among the most frequently visited sites on the Internet; where reality television stages spectacles of mating (Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire), abjection (Fear Factor), and sadism (Survivor) for a global audience; and where the appeal to unconscious, inchoate fears and desires constitutes the express stock and trade of advertising executives and political consultants alike: might not psychoanalysis constitute the untranscendable intellectual horizon of our postmodern world?

The evidence is all around and not just in popular culture. In the humanities, what serious work is done that does not, at least tacitly, assume the existence and centrality of a concept of the unconscious, of repression, of desire, and of the sexed subject? This is not to say, of course, that there are no telling critiques of psychoanalysis. But when Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Toril Moi and many others offer cogent refutations of individual psychoanalytic concepts and thinkers, they invariably do so from positions that simultaneously acknowledge their dependence on psychoanalytic thought, often of a Lacanian cast.

Even thinkers who are termed “antipsychoanalytic,” such as Michel Foucault, reveal their simultaneous dependence on and distance from the discourse they seek to criticize. Thus Tim Dean in an invaluable essay on Queer Theory in the present volume shows that, in what is taken to be Foucault’s most explicitly antipsychoanalytic text, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, at the very moment where he is elaborating the concept of “biopower,” Foucault also invokes the “death instinct.” Moreover, in his 1982 course at the Collège de France, Foucault explicitly acknowledged that only two twentieth century thinkers, Heidegger and Lacan, had anticipated his investigation of the subject’s relation to truth. Thus, it is less surprising than it might seem that in a series of recent conversations I had with scholars in and around the Institut Mémoires de l’Edition Contemporaine, where Foucault’s archives are kept, Slavoj Žižek, the Lacanian philosopher and theorist of popular culture was consistently cited as the most prominent contemporary cultural theorist, now that the generation of soixante-huit has all but passed.

Psychoanalysis’s continuing vitality and its survival into the twenty-first century is intimately linked with the work of Jacques Lacan. Jean-Michel Rabaté’s Cambridge Companion to Lacan constitutes a true intellectual milestone in our understanding of his oeuvre. This is an anthology of consistently high quality that not only presents the thought of one of twentieth century’s the most difficult theorists in a clear and concise manner, but it also makes it possible for us to understand Lacan’s work in its intellectual, biographical, and clinical contexts. This is crucial for two reasons. First, Lacan is—in large part owing to his own often obscure and provocative manner of formulating his insights—the psychoanalyst people love to hate. By reconstructing the complex personal, intellectual, and social dialogue in which his formulations (often of an off-the-cuff nature in his weekly Seminars) were inscribed, the present volume helps to render him, if not a more benevolent, at least a more sympathetic figure. Indeed, Catherine Liu in her enlightening juxtaposition of Lacan and Warhol describes how Lacan’s office was kept open from morning to night and how anyone who was troubled, needed help, or simply wanted to catch a glimpse of...