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A review essay on Jacques Lacan concerning the following four books:
. By Elizabeth Roudinesco. Translated by Barbara Bray. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1997. Pp. 574.
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through ‘Popular’ Culture. By Slavoj Zizek. Cambridge, MA and London: M.I.T. Press. 1991. Pp. 188.
Writings on Psychoanalysis: Freud and Lacan. By Louis Althusser. Edited by Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron. Translated and with a preface by Jeffrey Mehlman. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 1996. Pp. 194.
The Subject and the Self: Lacan and American Psychoanalysis. Edited by Judith Feher Gurewich & Michel Tort, in collaboration with Susan Fairfield. Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson Inc. 1996. Pp. 266.
Elizabeth Roudinesco begins her intellectual biography of the influential French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan (1901-1981), with a description of his forebears, natives of the city of Orléns who made their fortune as vinegar producers in the early nineteenth century. The vinegar of Orléns was famous throughout the world, and its recipe was a well-kept secret. But, Roudinesco tells us, there were persistent rumours about the production process that threatened to damage its reputation. It was said that some manufacturers ‘had had the bright idea of ordering their workers to relieve themselves into barrels of wine. Within days the liquid [would turn] into a fine vinegar, without a hint of the dubious catalyst that had set off the fermentation’ (p. 3).
It is characteristic of Roudinesco to present this pungent little story without commentary, leaving her readers to decide whether to take it as anything other than an amusing anecdote. Its appearance in the first paragraph of her book suggests, however, that one might read it as something more—perhaps as an allegory commenting on the dubious or disconcerting nature of the intellectual merchandise that Lacan would himself later purvey in the psychoanalytic as well as the broader cultural world. T