Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis (review)

terior or external to the Symbolic. On the other hand, due to worries that such a description risks reducing Lacan to a kind of developmental vitalist, Verhaeghe occasionally insists that the Real is strictly internal to the Symbolic. The Real doesn’t pre-exist the Symbolic, but is produced immanently out of the internal impasses of the symbolic order (this should lead to some skepticism about the notion of the Real being utterly unrepresentable). Given just how heavily Verhaeghe relies upon this particular Lacanian register for explanatory purposes, sorting out its nuances is crucial for this text. The fifth and sixth essays, “Subject and Body” and “Mind your Body,” seek to shed light on a Lacanian theory of embodiment. What is the position of the body in Lacan’s thought? “Subject and Body” does a nice job of charting the course of Lacan’s engagement with the notion of embodiment as it evolves over the course of his teaching. Verhaeghe unveils some surprising consistencies connecting the early period of the “mirror stage” and the later seminars of the 1970s. In “Mind your Body,” Verhaeghe argues that the late Lacan aims at overcoming Descartes, at superseding the dualisms associated with the modern subject. Verhaeghe claims that Lacan dispenses with dualism. This sixth essay is a bit disappointing in two ways. First, it pays absolutely no attention to the myriad references in Lacan’s work to Descartes. Verhaeghe is silent as regards Lacan’s meticulous examinations of the (often positive) relation between the Cogito and his own theory of subjectivity. Second, isn’t the fundamental opposition between the Real and the Symbolic a dichotomy of sorts? Verhaeghe, while maintaining that a Lacanian stance rejects dualistic models, doesn’t explain why his own arguments are not themselves reliant upon just such models. In terms of style and presentation, Verhaeghe’s English is awkward at times, and the text is rife with grammatical errors and misspellings. Also, parts of the book are repetitive. For example, the second essay (“From Impossibility to Inability”) duplicates a discussion contained in Does the Woman Exist?. Another symptom of repetitiveness is that Verhaeghe cites the same few passages from Lacan’s work again and again. Nonetheless, Verhaeghe displays an impressive mastery of Lacan’s corpus. Furthermore, he deserves to be praised for the boldness and cogency of his departure from the hackneyed and questionable appeal to sexuality as the inexplicable substratum of the unconscious. Beyond Gender is definitely representative of the current state of the art in Lacanian theory. —Adrian Johnston