Abstract

Philippe Van Haute, a practicing psychoanalyst as well as a professor of philosophy who was schooled in the phenomenological tradition, is well-positioned to write the book that he has written. In Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion” of the Subject—A Close Reading, Van Haute presents a close reading of one of Lacan’s most philosophically important essays, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious.” This essay appears in Ecrits but was first delivered in a seminar organized by the philosopher Jean Wahl. Instead of attempting to produce an overview of Lacan’s work as a whole, something which has already been done, Van Haute prefers to give us a detailed exposition of this one text. Rather than merely “getting the general idea,” he makes the reader confront the complexity of Lacan’s text and the philosophical issues that it raises. These are issues that spread well beyond this particular essay and extend to Lacan’s work as a whole. They also are the concerns of European philosophy in the last half of the twentieth century.