On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore [Paperback]

Jacques Lacan (Author), Jacques-Alain Miller (Author), Bruce Fink (Author)

Book Description

Series: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan | Publication Date: November 1, 1999

A startling psycholinguistic exploration of the boundaries of love and knowledge.

Often controversial, always inspired, Jacques Lacan here weighs theories of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge from such thinkers as Aristotle, Marx, and Freud. He leads us through mathematics, philosophy, religion, and, naturally, psychoanalysis into an entirely new way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives. Long anticipated by English-speaking readers, this annotated translation presents Lacan's most sophisticated work on love and desire.

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. His many published works include Ecrits and The Seminars.


Jacques-Alain Miller is Director of the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII and editor of Lacan's Seminars.

Bruce Fink, today’s premier translator of Lacan, is winner of a Translation Prize from the French-American Foundation for his translation of Lacan's Ecrits. He is a professor of psychology at Duquesne University and lives in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (November 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393319164
• ISBN-13: 978-0393319163
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #536,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) was one of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers. His many published works include Ecrits and The Seminars.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is an excellent translation of a key Lacan text., March 12, 1999

By 

Annie Pulis ([e-mail]) (Columbia, Missouri) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972-1973 (Seminar of Jacques Lacan) (Bk. 20) (Hardcover)

In his translation of this, one of Lacan's late and most provocative seminars, Bruce Fink not only clarifies and corrects mistakes in the Jacqueline Rose translation, _Feminine Sexuality_, but offers the _entire_ Seminar XX with careful attention paid to Lacan's multivalent language. Extensively footnoting Lacan's text, Fink aims to open up fully Lacan's references and wordplay, and this proves to be an approach especially helpful for the non French-speaking reader. Seminar XX may not be the introductory text novice Lacan scholars would wish for, (there are some new books on Lacan by other authors that would be more helpful for those seeking an overview of Lacan's teaching and methodology) but this text could be a good place to start with Lacan per se simply because the translation makes it easier to read than other, more widely read of Lacan's translated texts. Students interested particularly in feminine sexuality and jouissance will find this text key, and there are chapters in which Lacan addresses the limits of knowledge, God and mysticism, and the sexual relation. In this seminar, Lacan also offers exegesis on the four discourse structures and the dense but important sexuation graph, which positions the masculine and feminine in relation to epistemology and the Father's Law. People doing work on Jakobsonian poetics might find the early chapters especially interesting for their critical approach.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars There's such a thing as One, January 18, 2003

By 

Michelle Pettit - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972-1973 (Seminar of Jacques Lacan) (Bk. 20) (Hardcover)

If you are familiar with Lacan, you probably know what you're in for...if not, read on for my own brief understanding in 50 words or less. First of all -- Lacan is well-worth the effort. He is difficult, whooly, interesting, funny, serious, witty. "There's such a thing as One" It is there that the serious begins. For Lacan as for Freud, the child is born into desire. But for Lacan this desire is more than sexual (though also sexual) Desire comes out of the imbalance between what we perceive, language and images, and what actually is the Real. It is impossible to satisfy this desire, because we cannot know what we want. The real is utterly unknowable. Longing is displaced -- we long for everything else instead: sex, food, drugs, alcohol, consumer objects--trying to fill the void of desire. But we are not satisfied by any of these things, because as soon as the desire is fulfilled it vanishes.
Some of Lacan's concepts (as the one above) I read and say -- yes that's IT ... as Lacan said in the lecture translated in this book-- "It's not working out and the whole world talks about it and a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so." Many of the concepts in this book were worth the wading through it -- which I did in one night, entranced, reading through as if in a maze -- or in one of Lacan's Borromean Knots (in which the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real are linked like the rings of a Borromean knot)

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Simply amazing, September 5, 2005

By 

Zippo "Zippo" (Mexico) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore (Paperback)

A wonderful translation (with great notes), of an incredible text. Lacan is a very "dense" writer - in the sense both of difficult and rich. I am not even going to try to sum up all of the ideas and insights that this book will force YOU to produce. (For a useful introduction to Lacan see the books written by Bruce Fink - the translator).