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If you have ever been curious about the apparent confusion in contemporary theory between the penis and the phallus, then this book will not only clarify the issue, but it will show how useful such theory is to tease out aspects of what has been called the crisis of masculinity. A book beginning with a longish chapter on Lacanian theory might seem daunting, but Keith Reader's elucidation of the oscillation between biology and signification where Lacan's approach to the phallus is concerned is a model of exegesis: he patiently tracks Lacan's use of the term from its rather flaccid biological beginnings as fetish, to its rather harder (per)version as ‘Priapic king of the signifying castle’. He then explores the relationship between the phallus and the Kristevan abject, via Lacan's objet petit a; he convincingly shows how both play a crucial role in subjectivity formation through their detachability and their ambiguous ontological status. Most of the book explores the interplay between abjection and the phallus in a variety of texts, starting with Bataille's fiction (Histoire de l'œil, Madame Edwarda, Le Bleu du ciel, L'Abbé C, Ma mère), and, much more briefly, that of Adamov. There is then a chronological leap to the melancholically self-flagellating work of Serge Doubrovsky (Le Livre brisé, L'Après-vivre), and the morosely misanthropic work of Michel Houellebecq, which Reader characterizes as leading to the ‘burnt-out phallus awaiting … oblivion’. After this, it is something of relief to turn to the ‘narrative transvestism’ of Christiane Rochefort (Archaos ou le jardin étincelant, Quand tu vas chez les femmes) and Christine Angot (Les Autres, Sujet Angot, L'Inceste), where phallic power is wielded by women over abjected male narrators. The final chapter is devoted to a range of films: La Grande Bouffe, where a group of male friends eat themselves to death; La Dernière Femme, where Depardieu famously cuts off his penis; Eustache's garrulous exploration of ‘sexual liberation’, La Maman et la putain, and his less well-known Une sale histoire; Godard's Sauve qui peut (la vie) and Prénom Carmen; Noé's extraordinary Seul contre tous, which recent work in cinema studies has identified as one of the key films of the ‘cinema of evil’ or ‘cinema of the body’; and, briefly, Le Pornographe. One might have wished some other texts to have figured than those chosen here, and which might have seemed to exemplify contemporary trends in failed masculinities even more graphically — for example, where films are concerned, those of Claire Denis (Beau travail, Trouble every day) — but Reader's patient excavation of the failures of the phallus over more than 50 years of French culture gives the lie to the view that the crisis of masculinity is recent. Rather, it shows that the charge of phallogocentrism common in critical thought during the 1980s and 1990s should be counterbalanced to some degree with a strong current of exhausted, suicidal and abject masculinity, revelling (perhaps a little too ostentatiously and loquaciously, it has to be said) in severed penises and defective phalluses.
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