The daughter of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tries to make
sense of her relationship with her father. "When I was born, my
father was already no longer there." Sibylle Lacan's memoir of her
father, the influential French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, is told
through fragmentary, elliptical episodes, and describes a figure
who had defined himself to her as much by his absence as by his
presence. Sibylle was the second daughter and unhappy last child of
Lacan's first marriage: the fruit of despair ("some will say of
desire, but I do not believe them"). Lacan abandoned his old family
for a new one: a new partner, Sylvia Bataille (the wife of Georges
Bataille), and another daughter, born a few months after Sibylle.
For years, this daughter, Judith, was the only publicly recognized
child of Lacan-even if, due to French law, she lacked his name. In
one sense, then, A Father presents the voice of one who, while
bearing his name, had been erased. If Jacques Lacan had described
the word as a "presence made of absence," Sibylle Lacan here turns
to the language of the memoir as a means of piecing together the
presence of a man who had entered her life in absence, and in his
passing, finished in it. In its interplay of absence, naming, and
the despair engendered by both, A Father ultimately poses an
essential question: what is a father? This first-person account
offers both a riposte and a complement to the concept (and the
name) of the father as Lacan had defined him in his work, and
raises difficult issues about the influence biography can have on
theory-and vice versa-and the sometimes yawning divide that can
open up between theory and the lives we lead.
General
| Imprint: |
MIT Press
|
| Country of origin: |
United States |
| Series: |
The MIT Press |
| Release date: |
June 2019 |
| First published: |
2019 |
| Authors: |
Sibylle Lacan
|
| Translators: |
Adrian Nathan West
(Translator (Spanish and German to English))
|
| Dimensions: |
178 x 127 x 14mm (L x W x T) |
| Format: |
Hardcover
|
| Pages: |
104 |
| ISBN-13: |
978-0-262-03931-4 |
| Categories: |
Books >
Social sciences >
General
|
| LSN: |
0-262-03931-1 |
| Barcode: |
9780262039314 |
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