David Macey's Lacan in Contexts is, quite simply, the best book I've read about Lacan to date. There are a number of key things that set it apart. First, Macey has demonstrated mastery over his topic, as shown by his sophisticated readings of not only Freud and Lacan, but other related linguists and philosophers. Second, he clearly knows and understands the French context in which Lacan was operating. Third, he is brutally objective, recognizing the importance of Lacan's work while being able to show its shortcomings. Finally, he takes a genealogical view of Lacan's work, showing brilliantly how it has changed and evolved in ways that often see Lacan contradicting his earlier positions.

The necessity of such a genealogy is made plain in Chapter 1: The Final State. This "final state" refers to the mythologizing attempts of Lacan and Lacanians to present Lacan's work as a coherent whole. In [b:Jacques Lacan: An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought|262580|Jacques Lacan An Outline of a Life and a History of a System of Thought|Élisabeth Roudinesco|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1391656006s/262580.jpg|254522], Roudinesco lays much of the blame for this hardening of Lacan's thought into an orthodoxy at the feet of Jacques-Alain Miller, but my sense is that it is a widespread practice in the field of Lacan studies. In this opening chapter Macey gives an extensive overview of how this attitude has come into existence, including the particularly eye-opening example of the journal Screen's adoption of Lacanian psychoanalysis as its main theoretical basis.

Chapter 2: Retrospective provides a valuable reminder of the context in which Lacan's intellect was formed, particularly the anti-German/Jewish sentiment that prevailed in France for much of that time.

Chapter 3: Baltimore in the Early Morning connects Lacan's thought with that of the surrealists, whose importance, Macey shows, is crucial to understanding his work. Macey especially notes the way that people like Duchamp, Leiris, and Queneau influenced Lacan's style, especially his wordplay and puns. The surrealists also give Lacan an early model for the critique of language, as well as supplying him with a crucial critique of feminine sexuality in the form of Breton's "convulsive beauty."

Chapter 4: Philosophy and Post-Philosophy gives the reader some contexts about the state of philosophy in France during Lacan's early life, and his ambivalent relationship to it. Indeed, his implicit admiration for Kojève and Sartre are symptoms of the move away from the neo-Kantianism doctrine prevalent in French schools. Kojève is also singled out here as a crucial influence on Lacan's style.

Chapter 5: Linguistics or Linguisterie? is an in-depth analysis of Lacan's use of linguistics. Macey asks whether Lacan can be taken seriously as a linguist, or even a philosopher of language, to which the answer is most decidedly answered in the negative. That does not mean, however, that he has nothing to contribute in those areas, but his use of these language-related fields is playful rather than serious - it is, in Lacan's terminology, a form of linguisterie.

Chapter 6: The Dark Continent turns the attention to the issues of gender and sexuality in Lacan's work. Macey is scathing in his review of Lacan's sexism, and argues that the theory of the phallus, for all its appeal to feminism, retains all the problems of a patriarchal discourse. While I am very sympathetic to Macey's view here, I thought this was the weakest part of the book, mostly because he does not address why it is that so many feminists have seen Lacan's ideas as a useful tool for critiquing patriarchal notions of gender and sexuality. I also didn't like how he often substituted the views of Lacan's disciples for those of Lacan himself.

On the whole, I found Lacan in Contexts to be a brilliant book, full of sharp analysis and genuine insight into what Lacan was trying to do and what influenced his ideas. I would go so far as to say that this book has revolutionized my view of both Lacan and his critics: I cannot read the unhistorical glosses of his ideas without thinking about the cracks and discontinuities that, as Macey reveals here, lie beneath that apparently smooth surface. ( )