Sibylle Lacan. The father’s name, the daughter’s voice

Abstract

With the date ‘August 1991-June 1994’ Sibylle Lacan’s book A Father, explicitly affirms that the year she began writing marked the tenth anniversary of the death of a father also celebrated by another daughter, Judith Miller, with her lavish Album Jacques Lacan, conceived as a ‘monument’ worthy of his memory.  Sibylle’s ‘puzzle’, conversely, expresses fragmentation: that of memory, of discourse and of narrative; of the family; of communication garbled by the unspoken; and of the Self.  She portrays a hopeless search for a father – and the resulting devastation.  Comparison with the conversations recorded by Elizabeth Roudinesco in her biography of Lacan (1993) throws an interesting light on the gestation of the book and on its contribution to a rebirth, the birth, as a writer, sanctioned by Sibylle Lacan’s subsequent book, Points de suspension (2000), even as it enigmatically announces the irreparable loss of that vocation.