Lacan and the Human Sciences ed. by Alexandre Leupin (review)

Book R eviews God’s omnipotence, the offspring of the devil, and even the product of bestiality. Yet as Marie-Helene Huet reveals in Monstrous Imagination, there also existed a particularly insistent myth that ascribed the origin of monsters to the force of the female imagination. Until the study of anomalous formations became a science in the early nineteenth century, theorists from Hippocrates to Malebranche maintained that a woman’s imagination—if excited by an unbridled longing or forceful image at the moment of conception—could dis­ place the proper model for resemblance (the father), and in so doing engender the birth of a monster. In early theories of reproduction, the maternal imagination thus became an aber­ rant faculty that not only created monstrosities, but disturbed what was supposed to be a larger order within Nature. In the first half of the book, entitled “the Mother’s Fancy,” Huet examines the dis­ course on the female imagination from the Renaissance era of superstitious divination to the end of the Enlightenment, a time when the monster was stripped of any metaphysical significance and absorbed, albeit awkwardly, into the budding natural sciences. If, in her treatment of the debate on monstrosity, Huet chooses to favor “ imaginationism” at the expense of the larger philosophical battle taking place during the seventeenth and eigh­ teenth centuries—namely, the much-debated role of God in the creation of monsters—her approach allows for an exploration of heretofore neglected correlations between French Classicism, preciosity, and male suppositions about female reproduction. Moreover, Huet’s careful indexing of the different notions related to the question of imagination and monstrosity facilitates the book’s intriguing transition from the pseudo­ science of the Enlightenment to Romantic literature’s myriad examples of monstrous progeny. In the second section of the book, entitled “ Metaphors of Procreation,” penetrat­ ing analyses of Shelley’s Frankenstein, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, Villiers de l’lsleAdam ’s L ’Eve Future, and Mayrink’s Der Golem reveal how Romanticism amended the relationship between depraved yearnings and procreation. Unlike earlier theories that implicated the mother, Romantic aesthetics tended to depict unnatural offspring as the fruit of a depraved male mind who longed above all to reproduce without the other. Romanticism recast the myth of procreation. The forsaken father, as artist or mad scien­ tist, surpassed the mother’s ability to conjure disfiguring images; he animated form and matter, generating life, albeit monstrous. Huet’s thoughtful chronicle of this resilient myth fills a lacuna that has long existed in the study of civilization’s view of monstrosity. Monstrous Imagination is soundly docu­ mented and eminently readable intellectual history. A n d r e w C u r r a n New York University Alexandre Leupin, ed. L a c a n a n d t h e H u m a n S c i e n c e s . Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1991. Pp. 191. $27.50 cloth. This collection began as a colloquium exploring a Lacanian program of research, held at Louisiana State University, November, 1986. The articles based on those lectures are not at all dated. In fact, this study exemplifies the process of theoretical invention in a way that makes it useful as a textbook in courses concerned with the impact of French theory on the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. The exemplarity of the volume begins with the introduction by the editor, who, in pro­ viding a basic background that is assumed by the specialized contributors, gives us the most concise account I know of concerning the scientific status of Lacan’s mathemes, his dia­ grammatic schemas, and topological knot models. Lacan’s contribution to epistemology is located in his correlation of the “ incompleteness” of the individual human subject VOL. XXXIII, NO. 4 103 L ’E sprit C réateur (modeled as the two holes in a torus, ahd assigned the name “ desire” ), with the incomplete­ ness theorem of Godel, who demonstrated the impossibility of any scientific field to account fully for itself in its own terms. On one hand, Lacan rejected any special status for the “ human” sciences: A field is either “ science” in the modern sense developed in the...