The Cambridge
Companions are a success.  Not only has the original series, Companions
to Literature, grown to over 100 publications since its launch in the
eighties, but there are now Companions to philosophy, religion, music
and national cultures, too.  All books across the disciplines begin with a
chronology and end with a selected bibliography.  Their main part consists of
fifteen previously unpublished essays by established international experts. 
Because Companions are aimed at non-experts and especially students, the
essays typically address topics that are considered relevant in contemporary
academic discourse.  Ideally, the writing is accessible without coming across
as introductory or didactic.  Good Companions allow the reader to get a
grip on a topic by observing contemporary researchers "in action", as
it were.

Jean-Michel
Rabaté, professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Pennsylvania,
has now edited the Companion to Lacan (2003).  Fifteen scholars from the
Americas and Europe interpret the texts and speeches of the influential
Parisian psychoanalyst and theoretician Jacques Lacan (1901-1981).  They
explore the traditions he stands in (or loudly puts himself in), isolate key
concepts and important controversies and introduce the reader to the huge
impact Lacan’s work has had on cultural studies, film studies and literary
criticism.

To
contribute accessible, yet challenging and rigorously argued essays on Jacques Lacan
is not an easy task.  More than twenty years after his death in 1981 there is
still no generally agreed upon order in the forest of technical concepts Lacan
left behind.  But despite his reputation for being a difficult, if not
deliberately obscure author, Lacan is now generally acknowledged for his
original work on (and with) Freud’s theory of the unconscious, and for his
ability to forge fashionable theoretical tools from materials gathered from
other disciplines.

These
synthetic (at best) or eclectic (at worst) tendencies are addressed by many
essays in this volume: Elisabeth Roudinesco offers a scholarly examination of
the different occasions (between 1936 and 1949) on which Lacan appropriated
Henry Wallon’s technical notion of the "mirror stage" (without
acknowledging his source; Lacan tended to be forgetful with respect to
quotation marks).  Dany Nobus, who has recently stressed the practical aspects
of Lacan’s work in a book reviewed by Adrian Johnston on this website, sketches
Lacan’s interest in language in general and structuralist linguistics in
particular.  Unfortunately he doesn’t add much to the countless presentations
of Lacan’s adaptation of the core concepts of Saussure’s linguistics already on
the market.  Bernard Burgoyne tracks Lacan’s often puzzling uses of
mathematical formulas more or less chronologically throughout his work (without
rendering them less puzzling), Charles Shepherdson lists most of the
philosophers that Lacan recommends for close reading, and Joe Valente sketches
Marxist elements in Lacan’s work and how Slavoj Zizek has sexed them up since.

But
although the majority of the contributions in this volume are dedicated to non-psychoanalytic
materials that Lacan incorporated and to non-psychoanalytic disciplines that he
inspired (on top of the papers listed above there are also Deborah Luepnitz’
and Tim Dean’s solid introductions to Lacanian traces in feminism and queer
theory), Rabaté actually wants this Cambridge Companion to return, as it
were, to Lacan the practicing psychoanalyst.  The English version of Lacan’s
conceptual apparatus has largely been confined to literary criticism, film
studies and cultural studies, and in general the ties between the two
institutions of psychoanalysis and academia in the English-speaking world have
been weak.  Within cultural studies people like Slavoj Zizek have successfully
severed the ties binding Lacan’s terminology to the practice of psychoanalysis. 
Symptomatically one of Rabaté’s students, when reminded of the clinical origin
of the concepts she was discussing, noted that she had forgotten that one could
do such a nineteenth century thing like lying on a couch and indulge in free
association.  This in return has led to the questionable situation that a book
published in the same series as the Companion to Dickens and the Companion
to the Russian Novel stresses the importance of clinical and practical
aspects of Lacan’s work, and makes a point of commissioning essays from practicing
psychoanalysts.

The
published pieces turn out to be less grounded in a state-of-the-art account of
practical psychoanalysis than we may have hoped for.  None of the essays, not
even Diana Rabinovitch’s promisingly titled "What is a Lacanian clinic?",
shows Lacan’s conceptual apparatus at practical work.  Rabinovitch leaves us
with often-repeated remarks on Lacan’s controversial idea that psychoanalytical
sessions should not always last just an hour.  They should be of variable
length to make it impossible for the patient’s unconscious to time the
session, as it were.  Lacan was soon accused of greed because his sessions
with "variable" length invariably turned out to be quite short.

There
are essays in this book that are, as the idea behind the Companions
series suggests, both accessible and inspiring.  The editor himself opens the
volume with a piece on "Lacan’s turn to Freud", which suggests that Lacan’s
seemingly preposterous presentation of himself as Freud’s truth may be
defensible if we radically question our conceptions of what it is to interpret
a text or to stand in an intellectual tradition.  Unfortunately Rabaté opts for
a biographical sketch of when and how Lacan actually turned to Freud, instead
of exploring the idea of a new "science of personality"
systematically, perhaps by contrasting it with the criteria of interpretational
adequacy presupposed in standard academic hermeneutics.

Darian
Leader attempts to analyze explanatory myths as parts of Lacanian
methodology in an inspired and unpretentious essay.  Leader’s thesis is
straightforward: Lacan adopts Freud’s idea of treating unconscious production
of impossibilities or incompatibilities as a defense mechanism.  The
child’s trouble with representing the mother as a sexual being and representing
her as an object of love, for example, can lead to a posited incompatibility
between the loved woman and the sexually desired woman.  As a consequence it
becomes impossible to love and sexually desire a woman at the same time.  Lacan
then subscribes to the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’ view that the
production of both individual (unconscious) and social (public) myths can be
understood as an answer to precisely such incompatibilities.  Myths however do not
solve an incompatibility problem, but provide "new ways of
formulating it logically" (p. 39).  They reshuffle or transform
the original incompatibility along some given relational structures that
Lévi-Strauss has identified as mythical.  Applied to Lacan’s theoretical work
this model may then be used to justify Lacan’s refusal to use explicitly
structured arguments for his views, as well as his appeals to mathematics. 
The idea is to interpret Lacanian myths, as well as his use of mathematical
formulas, as ways of dealing with the problem of the unsayable or "Real",
as Lacan calls it.  According to Leader’s structuralist Lacan we do not have to
be silent about what cannot be said — we can put it in terms of relational
structures such as myths or algebra.

Alenka
Zupancic from the Zizek camp in Slovenia writes lucidly about tragedy and the self-conception
of psychoanalysis as a modern institution that refuses to contribute to the "bourgeois
dream" by sending its patients back into the machinery of the "universal
spread of the service of good", as Lacan called it.  Almost in passing
(she is dealing with tragedies, after all) Zupancic succeeds in making the
problem of the ethical norms of psychoanalysis relevant to the reader.

At
its best, this collection is challenging, inspiring and entertaining.  At its
worst it provides mere variations on comments of those passages from Lacan’s
corpus that people have found fascinating for the last twenty years.  By now
many readers are familiar with the countless formulations of, and metaphors
for, the intuition that we all lack something, somehow, and that this "lack"
has something to do with language, and that language has something to do with
social norms or "the Symbolic" or "the law" or the "symbolic
father" or the "phallus".  The Cambridge Companion to Lacan
will be of great help to readers who, like Rabaté’s student, tend to forget
that some of the most fruitful concepts of, say, contemporary film studies are
rooted in a theory tailored to support and improve the practice of
psychoanalysis.  But it fails to bridge the gap between the broadly
structuralist and Freudian intuitions that many of us would like to see
incorporated into a rigorously argued, systematic, clear account of desire and
the unconscious — and the all too often uncooperative published texts and
comments based on seminars by Jacques Lacan.

© 2004 Dominique Kuenzle

Dominique
Kuenzle is a PhD candidate at the University of Sheffield.  He works on pragmatist accounts of conceptual
content and is interested in rational, discursive and epistemic normativity,
its ‘continental’ critics and rationalist defenses.

Categories: Psychoanalysis, Philosophical