A Father: Puzzle Contributor(s): Lacan, Sibylle (Author), West, Adrian Nathan (Translator) |
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ISBN: 0262039311 ISBN-13: 9780262039314 Publisher: MIT Press
WE WILL NOT BE UNDERSOLD! Click here for our low price guarantee Binding Type: Hardcover - See All Available Formats & Editions Published: June 2019 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Philosophers - Psychology | Movements - Psychoanalysis |
Dewey: B |
LCCN: 2018019330 |
Age Level: 22-UP |
Grade Level: 17-UP |
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.2" W x 7.1" L (0.40 lbs) 104 pages |
Features: Price on Product |
Review Citations: Kirkus Reviews 04/01/2019 |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |
Contributor Bio(s): Lacan, Sibylle: - Sibylle Lacan (1940-2013) was Jacques Lacan's second daughter from his first marriage. A translator of Spanish, English, and Russian, she followed A Father with a book devoted to her mother (Points de suspension). |
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