Abstracts and Book Reviews

S AND BOOK REVIEWS Richard Boothby. Death and Desire: Psychoanalytic Theory in Lacan's Return to Freud. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. xv + 266 pp. The importance of Richard Boothby's Death and Desire lies in its demonstration of the theoretical centrality of the death drive to Freudian psychoanalysis. Taking seriously the commonplace about Lacan's "return to Freud," Boothby's account makes a forceful case for the death drive-rather than the unconscious--as "the crowning discovery of psychoanalysis" (223). Perhaps it is not surprising that the most extensive vindication of the death drive's conceptual validity should come from a philosopher; for, as Boothby suggests,"The theory of the death drive was the highwater mark of Freud's speculative urge" (4). Because the death drive is a theoretical construct amenable to only negative definition, it has often been dismissed as useless for therapeutic purposes (by clinicians), or taken to represent the limit of conceptualization as such (by theorists). Death and Desire moves beyond this epistemological impasse by putting the concept to work in the service of an argument about Lacan's revivincation of psychoanalysis via his categories of real, symbolic, and imaginary. The conclusion reached is that "The concept of the death drive forms a kind of dynamic intersection between the three registers as it is at once the return of the real, the unbinding of the imaginary, and the agency of the symbolic" (224). So thorough is Boothby in his execution of this original argument that--although he qualifies the book's intent as "not to provide a comprehensive account of Lacan's work, but to traverse his thought obliquely along the lines