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A father :puzzle

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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.OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

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Series Title

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Call Number

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Publisher

: The MIT Press., 2019

Collation

1 online resource (104 pages).

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780262351126

Classification

NONE

Content Type

text

Media Type

computer

Carrier Type

online resource

Edition

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Statement of Responsibility

Sibylle Lacan ; translated by Adrian Nathan West.

Other Information

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desi

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Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4331/A-FatherPuzzle

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