Customer Reviews

Ecrits: A Selection

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

There are books about Jacques Lacan, and there are books that record his lectures in an informal way, but this is the only one that I know of that presents his words, as he meant them. Lacan is the guy who took Freud and De Saussure and integrated the two, and his insights are brilliant and very difficult to follow. This book is an odd combination of Lacan's histrionic attacks on his opponents, of tedious punnings and lengthy and awkward sentences, and wonderful insights. I keep picking it up and plugging away at it, in the belief that his interpretors and translators don't do him justice, and in the belief that he's the smartest guy around, in the humanities. He argues persuasively for example that the ego, which we think in the Anglo-American tradition is the major organ of our personhood, is little more than a clever creation of, and creator of words -- without integrity or grounding. De Saussure, the creator of Structuralism, left behind only one (albeit lucid) book, and I urge any "advanced hobbyists" of the intellect to tackle that prior to tackling Lacan, who read De Saussure closely and if nothing else develops our insight into what it means that language has its own patterns of distortion, its own "agenda" if you will, and that we struggle as persons to distinguish ourselves as persons from ourselves as creations of the system of meaning and language.

Sheridan made a brave attempt some 25 years ago to render Lacan's difficult prose into English, but Sheridan's command of French left a great deal to be desired, and his knowledge of Lacan's numerous seminars (that form the backdrop of most of his writings) was non-existent; after all, almost none of them were available even in French at that time. This old translation should no longer be reprinted: it is virtually incomprehensible at times and is often quite inaccurate. Readers seeking to study the Ecrits should consult the 2002 translation by myself; the paperback version will be out very shortly, will be competitive in price with this old translation, and is vastly superior in readability and accurary.

As another reviewer remarked, there are doubts as to how faithful translations of Lacan's "Ecrits" are, and I am therefore referring here to the original, published by "Editions du Seuil". These two volumes are a treasure trove of gems, perhaps first and foremost Lacan's treatment of the square root of -1, pp.183-5, volume 2 of the paperback edition, 1970. A tour-de-force indeed: he manages to link the square root of -1 to a phallus, even though, in French, you cannot pun on "root" the way you can in English. Lacan has a marvellous knack for stringing together words which, taken individually, mean something, and yet, once gone through Lacan's logorrhoea, end up devoid of any imaginable, and unimaginable, meaning whatsoever. Thus Lacan replaces the Saussurean sign (signifier and signified) with the Lacanian sign, entirely bereft of any possible signification. His Ecrits, however, suffer from one shortcoming: his venomous threatening innuendoes, usually in footnotes, which remain all too significant. A bitter viper, with the intelligence of a decerebrated viper, that is not even successful at being completely incoherent. Still, 5 stars for trying.

Lacan was the vanguard of the French Neo-Freudian lay psychoanalyst movement. He has some genuinely good ideas - notably the mirror stage, the short session, and the conception of psychoanalysis removed from medicine.

He also has some laughable ones - the Borromean knot, the Moebius strip and everything he mentions involving geometry (as famously satirized by Sokal) or formulas, or anything vaguely related to math. Sometimes he'll just make bizarre statements that border on religious (the writings on "the phallic signifier" are particularly egregious). The biggest problem is that sometimes he uses purely associative reasoning. He's also a fairly terrible writer (though this is a good translation, better than the overly dry Fink). On the whole though, he's still one of the more coherent post-structuralists.

If you're interested in psychoanalytic theory or psychology, this is a recommended read if you can stomach the usual French Post-structural idiosyncracies (oblique Hegel and Saussure references, obscurantism, longwindedness, complete unfamiliarity with scientific and mathematical concepts, etc).

Honestly, why this hasn't caught on in American psychoanalytic circles baffles me. There are some really interesting ideas, especially in "The Freudian Thing". This is obscure, but it isn't much more obscure than Kohut, et al. It's a really radical take on Freud.

This is pretty interesting stuff, but it is also turgid and littered with irrelevancy. I cannot emphasize how terrible of a writer Lacan is. He's squarely in Hegel territory.

He is also really, really awful at anything vaguely mathematical. If you have any familiarity with high level math or psych statistics you will probably laugh out loud at some of the ways Lacan tries to operationalize variables. He's operating well outside his abilities and education when he attempts to do that. Yet despite that, some academics in literary circles still cite these "formulas" as if they make sense. They don't.

I'd read Schneiderman's "Death of an Intellectual Hero" first (he's actually better at explaining Lacan than Lacan is and systematizes him in a cogent way), but this is worth a read after that if you can deal with Lacan's bloated writing - and are already familiar with his basic concepts (and shortcomings).

An important read for anyone who wants to know how psychoanalysis might be made to deal with cultural interpellation, and the questions of contemporary subjectivity. However, Lacan's language is dense and confusing, and the translation doesn't help.

If you merely dip into Lacan's masterwork, I cannot recommend too highly parts two and three of Function and field. Here's a sample on the ontological roots of the symbolic:

Man's freedom is entirely inscribed within the constituting triangle of the renunciation that he imposes on the desire of the other by the menace of death for the enjoyment of the fruits of his serfdom - of the consented-to sacrifice of his life for the reasons that give to human life its measure - and of the suicidal renunciation of the vanquished partner, depriving of his victory the master whom he abandons to his inhuman solitude.

Of these figures of death, the third is the supreme detour through which the immediate particularity of desire, reconquering its ineffable form, rediscovers in negation a final triumph. And we must recognize its meaning, for we have to deal with it. This third figure is not in fact a perversion of the instinct, but rather that desperate affirmation of life that is the purest form in which we recognize the death instinct.

The subject says 'No!' to this intersubjective game of hunt-the-slipper in which desire makes itself recognized for a moment, only to become lost in a will that is the will of the other. Patiently, the subject withdraws his precarious life from the sheeplike conglomerations of the Eros of the symbol in order to affirm it at the last in an unspoken curse.

So when we wish to attain in the subject what was before the serial articulations of speech, and what is primordial to the birth of symbols, we find it in death, from which his existence takes on all the meaning it has.... To say that this mortal meaning reveals in speech a centre exterior to language is more than a metaphor; it manifests a structure.

Only for the terminally hip and the fashionably confused. Lacan, the guru of so-called philosophers and other purveyors of phenomenological psycho-babble, takes Freud's "theories" to their reductio ad absurdum.