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J. Glynos, & Y. Stavrakakis (eds). Lacan & Science. London: Karnac, 2002. ISBN: 1-85575-921-7. £22.50. (Reviewed by Tony Chadwick).
This collection of eleven essays on the broad subject of Lacan and science is overdue, and this in more than one sense. As the editors explain in their “Acknowledgements”, almost four years separate the original idea of the collection from its publication in 2002, so that if the publication is as timely as ever, it is in large part due to the ever-present need, particularly for readers who can access only texts in English, to re-evaluate the position of psychoanalysis vis-à-vis science. The timeliness of such a collection in English is underscored by the dearth of monographs on the general topic. While books abound on the nature of science, from the question of method and the principles of the scientific endeavour (especially since the development of quantum mechanics) to the sociology of big science, and while there is a growing literature, both monographs and articles, on Lacanian psychoanalysis, the relationship between the two domains has been one of studied indifference. Scientists working in the area of neuropsychology or pharmacology cannot see the point of examining a theory that is 100 years old; most analysts, armed with Lacan’s characterisations of the University discourse, turn their back on a discourse where the barred subject is addressed, but the object cause of its desire is repressed.
In responding to the perceived need for a wide-ranging collection of essays, the editors are to be commended for avoiding one of the pitfalls of such an enterprise, namely that the pertinence of the individual essays will soon diminish. Library shelves are cluttered with thematic volumes and commemorative collections that, once the initial enthusiasm has passed, are rarely consulted again. Such is not the case with Lacan & Science. In the few weeks since the volume first arrived I have found myself returning to individual essays to read again a particularly felicitous expression of a problematic concept. Verhaeghe, for example, offers the following, pithy expression of one of the points of opposition between science and psychoanalysis: “Science, headed by Descartes, evacuates the subject and leaves its truth to God, finding security and certainty in a mechanical, desubjectivised world. Psychoanalysis has the ambition of confronting this division in its very causality, thus betting on the subjectivation of an originally alienating process.” (p. 138). Corfield’s essay “From Mathematics to Psychology: Lacan’s Missed Encounters” I have read twice now, each time with an enhanced enjoyment of the clarity combined with erudition that it displays. To choose only two examples from the eleven invites the suspicion that perhaps the others are not of the same quality, but such a doubt would be mistaken. With a few exceptions, noted below, the essays may be considered reference articles to which seasoned analysts and academics, as well as students, will be able to turn to explore (again) the fundamental issues that continue to be problematic for psychoanalysis in its relation to the sciences.
The editors have grouped essays thematically in a satisfying fashion: the first two (both by Glynos) outline in broad terms the notions of theory and evidence in the Freudian field, and Lacan’s position between science and ethics; the next two (by Nobus and Verhaeghe) treat from different perspectives the notion of causality in psychoanalysis; essays five and six (by Miller and Fink) deal with questions of epistemology and the status of knowledge in psychoanalysis and science. Essays seven and nine are linked by considerations of mathematics, and alone justify the purchase of the volume, but in an odd editorial decision, they are separated by the least satisfying essay of the collection, “Postures and Impostures”. Had the collection appeared at its intended moment (1999), shortly after the tempest brewed by Sokal and Bricmont, the essay by Glynos and Stavrakakis would have been topical, but its inclusion in a 2002 publication gives credibility to a media event that was hardly worth the attention it first received. Further, the quality of the argumentation is inferior to that of the surrounding essays, and the tone often petulant. The last two essays of the volume are not thematically linked; rather they deal with the matter of the place of psychoanalysis in relation to pharmacological approaches to mental disorders (Loose), and the positioning of the psychoanalyst as a public intellectual in the debate between cultural studies and the so-called Third Culture (Zizek)
(the remainder of this review can be read in JLS Vol.1 No.1).
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