The Madness of Book Titles

There are new book titles that offer themselves to readers as answers to questions that the readers themselves never thought to ask. For example, some book titles read “why is X, Y?,” “How the X did Y,” and so on. It seems to me that it is worth asking: what does this demonstrate of an orientation toward knowledge, or, indeed the Other? In other words, where is the unconscious?

In some, admittedly, simplistic sense: we can say that it presumes that the Other is no longer the one who knows. Rather, the Other is transformed into an other who questions, one whose question is perhaps presupposed by the One.

Let us look at two other strategies of titling a book.

First, Marshall McLuhan’s book titles. They were like probes — obscure and meant to expand the pre-established meanings of readers: “The Machanical Bride,” “The Medium is the Mass-age,” “The Global Village,” and so on. These are book titles that introduces an assortment of meanings, that seem to make manifest an equivocation. It is almost as though the titles were spoken and not written.

Second, there are the names that were given to Lacan’s seminars: “The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,” “Anxiety,” “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” and so on. These are book titles that seem to present a topic, topos, or even orientation, one that is not always clear when one goes on to read the book.

But what some of the emerging trends in book publishing show is that the question is presupposed by the one, without the Other. It is not the subject who brings the question. If the subject is the one who is represented, then he or she is also the one who reduces the individual — as both Jacques-Alain Miller and Marie-Helene Brousse reason. The subject is split, represented, and struggles with this representation. It is from this place that the question emerges.

Yet, the individual, when not reduced by the subject of representation, is without the field of the Other. If the field of the Other, as unconscious, is a Freudian field, one of knowledge, then the One without the Other presents knowledge without representation: it is the question that is presupposed in the Other.

In this way, we can see that there is either a question or a trigger, either a question which provokes one to work, or else a triggering which provokes one to panic.

In some sense, it could even be characterized as inverted hysteria: knowledge is produced, but it is not repressed.

It is the answer that comes before the question. This is how Lacan put it — and he said that it is characteristic of psychosis.