A Father

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.

“Slim, fragmented memories of the daughter that Lacan and readers barely knew. -- Kirkus Reviews -- ...a moving and laconic narrative of unrequited love... -- TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT --”

Slim, fragmented memories of the daughter that Lacan and readers barely knew. 

...a moving and laconic narrative of unrequited love...

Sibylle Lacan (1940-2013) was Jacques Lacan's second daughter from his first marriage. A translator of Spanish, English, and Russian, she followed A Father with a book devoted to her mother (Points de suspension).

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