Lacan at the Scene

by Henry Bond, Slavoj Žižek (Foreword)

What if Jacques Lacan--the brilliant and eccentric Parisian psychoanalyst--had worked as a police detective, applying his theories to solve crimes? This may conjure up a mental film clip starring Peter Sellers in a trench coat, but in Lacan at the Scene, Henry Bond makes a serious and provocative claim: that apparently impenetrable events of violent death can be more effectively unraveled with Lacan's theory of psychoanalysis than with elaborate, technologically advanced forensic tools. Bond's exposition on murder expands and develops a resolutely Žižekian approach. Seeking out radical and unexpected readings, Bond unpacks his material utilizing Lacan's neurosis-psychosis-perversion grid.

Bond places Lacan at the crime scene and builds his argument through a series of archival crime scene photographs from the 1950s--the period when Lacan was developing his influential theories. It is not the horror of the ravished and mutilated corpses that draws his attention; instead, he interrogates seemingly minor details from the everyday, isolating and rephotographing what at first seems insignificant: a single high heeled shoe on a kitchen table, for example, or carefully folded clothes placed over a chair. From these mundane details he carefully builds a robust and comprehensive manual for Lacanian crime investigation that can stand beside the FBI's standard-issue " Crime Classification Manual."

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Psychology

233 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Henry Bond is a writer and photographer; he is senior lecturer in photography at Kingston University; his exploration of Lacanian theory "Lacan at the Scene" was published, with a foreword by Slavoj Žižek, by the MIT Press in 2009.

Reviews

[Jed]

This book was great. The ideas of Lacan are not put to practical use often enough. Henry Bond knows a great deal about photography and art history. This combined with lots of Lacanian psychoanalysis gives a great deal of insight into how the psychology of a criminal would affect a crime scene. He divides them into three types: perverse, psychotic, and neurotic which each have distinctive characteristics and features. The perverse crime scene is created with an audience in mind, the psychotic is disorganized or only organized through a delusion, and the neurotic scene contains a fundamental ambivalence with reaction formation and repression playing the important part. Overall, this text is as much about photography as it is about crime or Lacan.

[Jesse Hann]

hmmmm

[Dans]

The forward by Zizek is really good. The rest is OKAY