Abstract
Charles Shepherdson's lucid and erudite book, Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis, makes four crucial contributions to contemporary debates in feminism and psychoanalysis. First, it underscores the originality of the psycho-analytical concepts of embodiment and sexuality irreducible either to biological essentialism or its opposite, the cultural construction of the body. Second, it discusses the relation between psychoanalysis and history that is distinct from both structuralism and historicism in its old and new incarnations. Third, by clarifying the specificity of psychoanalytical categories—the specificity that has often been lost in the Anglo-American reception of Jacques Lacan's work—it enables a different interpretation of the complex relation between Lacan and other influential French thinkers like Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Michel Foucault. In particular, Shepherdson intervenes into the reception of French feminism and addresses the difficulties generated by the mistranslation of sexual difference into sex/gender divide. And finally, Vital Signs introduces the work of the psychoanalytical writers lesser known in the United States such as Catherine Millot and Eugénie Lemoine-Luccioni.
Published Version
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