A Father

<b>The daughter of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan tries to make sense of her relationship with her father.</b><p>&#147;When I was born my father was already no longer there.&#148; 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 (&#147;some will say of desire but I do not believe them&#148;). 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&#151;even if due to French law she lacked his name. </p><p>In one sense then <i>A Father</i> presents the voice of one who while bearing his name had been erased. If Jacques Lacan had described the word as a &#147;presence made of absence&#148; 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 <i>A Father</i> 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&#151;and vice versa&#151;and the sometimes yawning divide that can open up between theory and the lives we lead.</p>