Lacan: The Silent Partners (review)

Locating the work of Jacques Lacan in a distinctive intellectual genealogy combining philosophy, social theory and psychoanalysis in a Lacano-Althusserian 'dialect' of the Marxian-Freudian tradition, this collection brings together an impressive range of topics and approaches. In keeping with its title, it looks awry from Hegel to Kojève, downplaying Plato and Socrates in favour of Heraclitus and Parmenides, revisiting the substance, subtlety and legerdemain of Lacan's engagements and name-checks. However, the contributions here are at the same time not merely ambivalent but indeed wary of giving excessive prominence to a genealogical role-call in the form of a fetishised counter-history of 'Modern Thought'. Accordingly, chapters here stress equally the folds, self-contradictions and unlikely or uncanny resonances that make up a more questioningly Deleuzian conceptual (anti-)history. And, indeed, Fredric Jameson's concluding essay highlights that the 'silent partners' of Lacan's work are also generic, formal and conceptual structures, from the place of his seminars in traditions of essay and symposium form to his embrace of mathemes and knots. Just as Lacan simultaneously claimed and abnegated a centre-stage position in his return to Freud, so the party is far from entirely Lacan's —although it is not slavishly Žižek's by any stretch. Its treatment of silence re-emphasizes elements of Žižek's work that have, as he himself has commented elsewhere, received less attention. Thus, as a soundtrack to the supporting cast's discussions of Schelling and others, his own essay on Wagner offers a thoughtful underscoring of the centrality of musical expressivity's articulation of Romantic philosophy's engagement with negativity. That said, other contributions tear energetically into their particular meat without feeling bound to genuflect unnecessarily to their conductor. Adrian Johnston, for example, goes straight for connections between Schelling and Lacan with hardly a sideways glance. Likewise, Miran Boz.ovic's treatment of Les Bijoux indiscrets dives directly and fruitfully into its Enlightenment context. Music and opera are key metaphors here in various regards, and it is not only in the strength of the individual voices, but also in the intertextual counterpoint and reflection of the various pieces that the energy, excitement and substance of this volume lies. What emerges is a distinctive and thought-provoking hubbub of conversation about themes such as speech, truth, freedom and materiality, about thinkers such as Hegel and Schelling, not to mention about Lacan as reader or indeed psychoanalysis as a reading practice (evinced in essays dealing with Kafka and James). In this regard, Lacan: The Silent Partners deserves an audience beyond any immediate target of Verso aficionados, offering contributions in the field of French studies at various levels: whether seemingly narrowly defined (from the point of view of insights into French literature and culture ranging from Diderot to Madame Bovary to May '68, to its contribution to study on Lacan's place in French thought) to the wider universes of philosophical debate as well as to social and cultural studies broadly conceived that shape our discipline.