The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (review)

Things, whether sweat or sap flows in you,
Forms, whether begotten from forge or flood,
Your stream is not denser than my dream
. . .

But, as soon as all words have died in my throat
. . .

Forms, whether sweat or sap flows in you,
It is the fire that makes me your eternal lover.

—Jacques Lacan, "Hiatus Intellectualis"

Jacques Lacan was an "eternal lover" of form, intrigued by the limits of signification, where words die and are rebegotten as things.¹ The psychoanalytic teaching he bequeathed has recently inspired Jacques-Alain Miller (2002–2003) to state that the future of psychoanalysis lies in an "effort for poetry." But Lacan's poetic language is one of the factors that has made him seem alien and alienating in the English-speaking world. This is all the more true because of the way he weds poetry to mathematics. In light of such resistance, the "effort for poetry" for which Miller calls is perhaps best preceded by an effort at being clear and systematic.

The Cambridge Companion to Lacan performs just such a propaedeutic labor for the English-speaking reader. The book compiles enriching essays by both practicing psychoanalysts and academics. Some focus on the clarification of Lacanian concepts (desire and jouissance, perversion, the symptom), while others explore the interfaces between Lacan's thought and allied fields that have either influenced (Marxism, philosophy) or have been influenced (feminism, queer theory, media studies) by his work.

The most fascinating essays in the volume combine an exposition of Lacanian concepts with an elaboration of their consequences for other disciplines. In "Lacan's Myths," for instance, Darian Leader observes that although after the 1950s Lacan did not "proceed to elaborate his ideas about myth . . . in any systematic way" (43), he did have repeated recourse to "the construction of relational modes of exposition involving stories, images, and fictions caught up with logical and mathematical models" (48) in his efforts to grapple with psychoanalytic problems of impossibility. These are Lacan's myths, and they utilize the same models found by Lévi-Strauss in his anthropological investigations, but they prefer logic to narrative as a form of expression. (Bernard Burgoyne makes a similar point in his essay, "From the Real to the Matheme: Lacan's Scientific Methods.") Leader illuminates Lacan's frequent reliance on graphs, mathemes, topology, set theory, and Boolean logic as a structural necessity, not a confusing eccentricity, of his thought, and he opens the way to further work on the cultural functions of such myths.

Alenka Zupančič's "Ethics and Tragedy in Lacan" likewise ventures beyond the clarification of Lacan's concepts while losing nothing in rigor. She cogently explicates that the "positing of the pathetic grandeur of human existence as resulting from [the] wound at its core" (175) is for Lacan a falsification of the consequences of the fundamental split in the subject, and the connection he draws between ethics and tragedy thus differs radically from philosophical and political accounts of the tragic.

What is the nature of this split? The essay by Néstor Braunstein, "Desire and Jouissance in the Teaching of Lacan," shows that it can be understood in terms of the opposition between these two key terms. On the side of desire, one finds fantasy, which involves unconscious representation. Jouissance, by contrast, is located on the side of the Real, which, in Lacan's view, is beyond representation. Desire does not bring satisfaction. Rather, desire is the remainder subtracted from the subject's demand (for instance, to the mother) once material need (for instance, for nourishment) has been satisfied. Jouissance does promise satisfaction, but only of the death drive. Tragedy, for Lacan, arises from the split between desire and jouissance, but it does not lie simply in a recognition of the impossibility of accepting this split without renouncing desire, as existentialist philososphy would have it. As Braunstein elaborates, Lacan argues that the tragic...