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L ’E sprit C réateur several instances of the “local knowledge” of death—ought we not add supremely local?— and its related observances. Published in Carcassonne under the direction of René Piniès, this volume brings together nine essays neither constructivist nor essentialist in their approaches, yet nonetheless adventurous and astute in the conceptual or theoretical issues clearly at stake in their elaboration. Daniel Fabre’s “ Avant-propos” unpacks the title of the volume—La Mort difficile— by relating a surrealist conte by René Crevel to the ethnographies found in the pages he (Fabre) is introducing. Each piece, including an inédit by Guillaume Apollinaire treating the superstitions of war and “le folklore du front,” approaches death in all its locality and specificity, even as its commonality for human communities is implicitly stressed. For, just as the corpse may be “ constructed” and has no doubt a textual status, so might it be viewed as both the fundamental sign and referent for all cultures, an “essence” of signification impossible to reduce to a lower common denominator. Yet, in the French examples so brilliantly collected in this volume, neither horn of Taussig’s dilemma proves fatal. In this volume, as in the best tradition in France represented by Durkheim, Mauss, and Dumont, the third choice comes from anthropology, not transcendence; from the ethnography, not the romance, of self. J a m e s W i n c h e l l University o f Alabama in Huntsville Ellie Ragland. E s s a y s o n t h e P l e a s u r e s o f D e a t h : F ro m F r e u d t o L a c a n . New York/ London: Routledge, 1995. Pp. 240. $55.00 (hardcover); $16.95 (paper). Like most theoretically enlightened academic readers today, I am neither a novice nor an expert when it comes to the arcane terminology and mathematical formulas that recur in Lacanian discourse. It is to Ellie Ragland’s credit, then, that she is capable of enlightening readers such as myself, both about psychoanalytic concepts that I understand well (e.g., the ego, lack, jouissance, identification with others, “ reality” ) and about Lacanian concepts that are less familiar to me (e.g., ftxion, lalangue, parletre, sinthome, lamelle). Two chapters are especially accessible and illuminating: chapter three, “ Lacan’s Concept of the Death Drive,” and chapter four, “ Causes of Illness and the Human Body.” With respect generally to the notion of death, I found this book to be both frustrating and enriching. My frustration results from the fact that it does not clearly or coherently develop the focus on death that is promised by its title. Rather than explaining the relation among the six essays or chapters of the book, the introduction takes up the subject of trans­ lation, which plays virtually no role in the body of the book. The six essays seem then to go their independent ways, often repeating material from other chapters and rarely if ever attempting to identify or follow a consistently developed argument. Having stated my major criticism of Essays on the Pleasures o f Death, I need to empha­ size that reading Ragland’s book is also a very enriching experience for readers interested in the subject of death. Its main points—that death is “ the comfort of fixity” (167) and that “ there is a death drive at the center of life” (103)—can be best understood in terms of Lacan’s reformulation of Freud. According to Ragland, Lacan goes much farther than Freud’s articulation in “ Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920) of an entropic, biologically grounded death drive, which is manifested as repetition compulsion and which derives from the human need for a stasis of satisfaction and an absence of conflict. For Lacan, the death drive is not a denial but an excess of jouissance. Lacan reformulated the death drive as “ a desire to maintainjouissance as a constant” (68), to maintain a mythic form of the ego—an ego fixity—that assures its consistency and alleviates anxiety. For Lacan it is “ the inertia of 108 W in ter 1995 B ook R eviews jouissance...

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