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Because I am beginning on time today, I will start by reading a poem which, in actual fact, has no relation to what I am about to say, but which is related to what I said last year, in my seminar, about the mysterious object, the most concealed object, that of the scopic drive. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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However, I cannot in good intellectual faith recommend this book to anyone. Partly, I freely admit, this is because I really don't think Lacan has really all that much to say. While I don't deny the fact that he *was* instrumental in putting a structuralist (and then post-structuralist) turn in psychoanalysis in some of his early essays (such as appear in "Ecrits") as well as pioneering contraversial new techniques of therapy, such as the variable-length session). But since those early daysthen, his reputation was due more to his charismatic personality and his influential friends within the French academic world, rather than because he had all that much to say.
This book is a perfect example of that. Taken from one of his mid-period seminars (essentially series of lecture courses), Lacan babbles, obfuscates, metaphorizes,and jokes his way through a set of vaguely philosophical points about the mind that could probably have been adequately summarized in a single lecture, or maybe 20-30 pages. (Note to readers of Freud, Jung, Adler, etc. Please be aware that, unlike those guys, Lacan makes no references whatsoever to practical therapeutic experiences to back up his claims; this is pure theoretical speculation. Also, don't expect Lacan's use of terms like 'drive', 'unconscious' or 'transference' to have anything in common with the more conventional psychoanalytical meanings of those terms.) His use of metaphors has a haphazard quality to it that, at times, borders on the nonsensical-- particularly when he starts borrowing them from fields that he clearly doesn't understand very well himself, such as topology. That said, it's undeniable that Lacan's audience was enamoured of his performance. The questions and answers that are included here show a rapt and almost fawning reverence for the man they affectionately refer to as "The Master". But what does a reader, not able to bask in the warm glow of Lacan's personal charisma, get out of this? Not much.... a tiny handful of rehashed ideas, and a few witty phrases here and there, but mostly one gets a lot of dense, pointless verbiage from a man who seems like he's trying to hide the fact that he's got nothing new to say .
If you're going to read Lacan, read some of the real stuff-- when he was actually putting forth new (and at the time, revolutionary) ideas like his essays on "The Mirror Stage", "The Form and Function of the Letter", and "Agressivity in Psychoanalysis"-- or, if you must, some of the early seminars. But by this point, Lacan had long since ceased to be someone worth paying attention to-- and this book simply isn't worth the trouble it takes to get through it. (There are a lot of difficult works that *are* worth the trouble-- Hegel's "Phenomenology of Spirit", Marx's "Das Kapital", Heidegger's "Being and Time", and even a lot of works by the other post-structuralists with whom Lacan is often associated-- but believe me, this just isn't one of them).
It will help (but will not guarantee understanding) if you have some background in Freud, even if it is only a slight one. Good luck!
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