Title: Speech or death?
Subtitle: language as social order : a psychoanalytic study
First published: 2003
Description: "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 inter-subjectivity 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 caught up in a productive 'solitary alliance' within the social symbolic order."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: Philosophy, Social sciences and psychoanalysis, Social sciences, Sociology, Semantics, Social Psychology, Psychoanalytic Theory
LC classification: BF175.4.S65 S2413 2003