Hypatia

Hypatia 17.4 (2002) 247-250

Book Review

Vital Signs:
Nature, Culture

Vital Signs: Nature, Culture, Psychoanalysis. By Charles Shepherdson. London, New York: Routledge, 2000.

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.

The main claim of the book is that the French revisions of Freud have been interpreted through the inappropriate paradigm based on the opposition between culture and nature, between social construction of gender and the biological difference of sex. This paradigm has not only obfuscated the originality of Lacan's contributions to the debates about embodiment, sexuality, and history, but has also generated some of the major misreading of the French feminist thinkers like Kristeva and Irigaray who take the psychoanalytic conceptual apparatus as the point of departure for their work. The perennial charge of essentialism is only one of the symptoms of this misreading. As Shepherdson argues,

The psychoanalytic emphasis on sexual difference is not a "return to nature," nor is it a refusal of history. . . . To speak of embodiment and sexual difference as something other than a [End Page 247] "social construction" is immediately to invite, in today's context, the misunderstanding that the body is being construed as a "biological fact," and that psychoanalysis amounts to a return to that essentialism of which it has so often been accused. But it is precisely this opposition between "biology and history," "nature and culture," "essentialism and historicism," that psycho—analysis rejects. . . . In this respect, the appeal to historicism as a cure. . . remains bound to a conceptual network that psychoanalysis does not support. When commentaries debate whether psychoanalysis is "genuinely historical" or just "another essentialism," one has a clear indication that the most basic theoretical challenge of psychoanalysis has been obliterated (94).

To recover this theoretical challenge, Shepherdson begins his argument with the psychoanalytic concepts of embodiment and sexuality, showing their constitutive relation to representation, symbol, and intersubjectivity. It is precisely the "denaturalization of sexuality," evident for instance in the distinction between the natural instinct and the libidinal drive, or in the psychoanalytic notion of symptom tied to memory, that not only reveals the plasticity and the diversity of sexuality but also makes it subject to history, displacement, and substitution. As the concept of the symptom, which is real and physical and yet irreducible to organic disorder, makes clear, the libidinal body is not a physiological organism because it bears the burden of discourse and memories. The intersubjective dimension of embodiment is particularly striking in anorexia where it assumes the form of an oral demand addressed to the mother. Somatized rather than verbalized, this demand compromises not only the needs of the organism but also the subject's desire. By asking for "nothing," which has not been sufficiently established, in place of nourishment, the anorexic's somatized demand reveals that embodiment is constituted not only through representation (as is the case of the imaginary body) but also through the symbolic containment and inscription of the void. Consequently, Shepherdson argues that "it is not a question . . . of eliminating the biological in the conceptualization of the body, but of recognizing the peculiar organization of sexuality in the...