Speech or Death?

Translated from the French "La Parole on la Mort?", Speech or Death? brings a new audience to Safouan's work. In Speech or Death? Safouan seeks to establish what constitutes the unity of a society and to enquire how, despite this unity, outside of which human life would seem quite impossible, we live, to quote Conrad, as we dream, alone. How is social agreement ever reached, given that the notion of intersubjectivity cannot offer an adequate account? Using questions of ambiguity in language and of interpretation in psychoanalysis, this book explores the alliance of religion and the social as they support the sacred. It links language, the law of the name, with the gift as obligation. Through its sympathetic critique of Freud's Totem and Taboo, it regards the religion of the father in the light of psychoanalysis: each person in caught up in a productive "solitary alliance" within the social symbolic order.