Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought by Christina Howells (review)

galanterie revealed the often mundane, physical, and emotional underpinnings of political causality. The theme is familiar to readers of La Princesse de Clèves; Grande revisits this novel provocatively and speculatively in an epilogue, suggesting that multiple ironies and even a great deal of humor may have gone largely unnoticed in Lafayette’s masterpiece. Grande states in conclusion that this kind of reading against the grain of Classicism aims to open up the study of the century by raising awareness of the presence of comedy, irony, and licentious humor alongside the appearance of order that has often defined the field. University of Iowa Roland Racevskis Howells, Christina. Mortal Subjects: Passions of the Soul in Late Twentieth-Century French Thought. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. ISBN 978-0-7456-5275-7. Pp. 263. $26.95. This fast-moving overview claims that“phenomenologists, existentialists, religious philosophers, psychoanalysts, and deconstructive thinkers [have] all resisted the idea of closure” in human existence (217). They do so through paradox and aporia, as in the idea of salvation achieved through failure. Our mortality simultaneously creates and abolishes our subjectivity. The soul, understood literally or metaphorically, offers a privileged site where the mind-body dualism may be overcome. Howells’s four main chapters feature phenomenologists (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir); religious philosophers (Marcel, Ricœur, Jankélévitch, Levinas); psychoanalysts (Lacan,Anzieu, Kristeva); and deconstructionists (Derrida, Nancy). Howells asks what happens to the subject in death, whereas“what is generally explored in the theorization of subjectivity is its genesis, not its dissolution” (20). She examines her chosen theorists respectfully, often revealing latent affinities. Sartre does not pursue the link between desire and death. Unlike Sartre, Merleau-Ponty finds it impossible to explore the structure of consciousness without analyzing the role of the body. He fails richly to imagine others and their interactions. Beauvoir has been “more successful in her discussion of mortality and passion than either Sartre or Merleau-Ponty”(54). Marcel also has a more realistic, humane conception of illness and death than does Sartre (75). But he is unsystematic, and avoids the hard questions. The Catholic Ricœur, who called himself a Socratic, rejects dualism, seeing the subject as‘irremediably incarnate.’He focuses on mourning, considering it the opposite of gaiety.Levinas stresses solitude as a wellspring of identity, not as a tragic condition. His non-standard terminology and his ideas are hard to pin down. Lacan thinks desire can never be satisfied, because it aims at an unknown alterity. It arises from a‘weaning complex.’Pleasure satisfies desire without ever slaking it, but language can partially assuage desire. Concerning female jouissance, Lacan remains vague and self-contradictory. His“account of love at the end of Encore is deeply bewildering [...]; negations replacing one another in [...] an unstoppable whirligig” 266 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 267 (146).Anzieu objects to Lacan’s concept of the self,but seems close to it.Kristeva’s treatment of passion and subjectivity surpasses others. Since the 1970s, she has analyzed three main versions of love: romantic, maternal, and transferential (in psychoanalysis). Like Lacan, she assigns a primary role to language in all her analyses, which tend to elide the real, physical body—ageing, sick, or dying. Howells’s interests in Derrida focus on his studies of mourning, particularly, how to remain faithful to the memory of a friend while respecting his alterity. He speaks as a survivor, whereas Nancy can speak as a person dying. Like Kristeva, Nancy separates love and desire, while mingling desire and pleasure. He rejects the idea of a body infused by the spirit, seeing bodies as a medley of ever-changing relationships to externality. After a heart transplant, he better than any other contemporary philosopher understands the subject as a concrete, inescapable reality (214). Howells’s helpful conclusion should be read first.A judicious, well-informed tour de force, her book typifies Polity’s high-level popularizations in the social sciences. Oberlin College Affiliate Scholar Laurence M. Porter Hubert, Marie-Claude, éd. Dictionnaire Beckett. Paris: Champion, 2011. ISBN 978-27453 -2144-2. Pp. 1200. 180 a. This dictionary is the result of a collaborative effort by sixty international specialists of diverse generations and levels of research experience that...