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Calum Neill Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, 272pp., £55.00/$34.65, ISBN: 978-0230294097
Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity is the result of the author's longstanding engagement with Lacanian thought. The book aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the French psychoanalyst's ideas on subjectivity and ethics to academics and students at the postgraduate level. It represents a useful starting point for an exploration of the central Lacanian notion of the split subject, alongside such related ideas as fantasy, desire and the drive. In conjunction with Lacan, the author also examines ideas by philosophers such as Levinas, Derrida and, inevitably, Slavoj Žižek.
After a brief excursion into the history of ethics from Plato to Kant, Neill introduces his central question: can Lacan's ideas provide an answer to the question of what exactly can be considered ethical in the age of post-enlightenment? This question is ambitious enough to have occupied such thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur, and the reader is thus reminded that with this type of book there is always a danger that it may simply become a lengthy exposition of why, in the absence of any universally valid norms or subject positions, it is impossible to provide any satisfying answers.
The first part of the book addresses the subject and begins with a Lacanian take on the Cartesian cogito: rather than the subject's coming into being because of having self-knowledge, this subject must be grasped as opaque. It is barred, lacking, while at the same remaining ignorant of this lack. Early on in the book the author makes one of the text's key points, namely, that ‘assuming a subjective position is already an ethical venture’ (p.