Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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)

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).

Shockingly poor translation of Seminar XX. Fink seems to be so indecisive in making simple translation options that he burdens the text with almost arbitrary options (including making up new words!). Lacan already has a bad reputation for being obscure, why Fink thought it would do him justice by making him more obscure is incomprehensible. Better to learn French than bother to slog through this terrible translation. Jacqueline Rose's older translation of key passages in "Feminine Sexuality" (Norton, 1982) is far better.

This book's translation is fine. However, I would not recommend this book to people with excellent French who would like to read Lacan in the original. Nor would I especially recommend it to women who are annoyed with Lacan and have had affairs with French literary critics. I find the Notes condescending.

This book was incredibly lame. Now first off I'm not highly intellectual, but I have a good training in the use of logic, and I can look words up in the dictionary if I don't understand them. So having done that this book is much less fun than a sodoku puzzle, and pretty much just a bunch a miserable nonsense.

This guy tries to explain in a lecture with all sorts of overwrought intectualizing about what it means to enjoy something, but he's got the voice of someone who should be smart?

I'll tell you what. Don't tell me if I can enjoy a pretzel. I'll personally decide what is enough salt for a pretzel and how starchy it should be without reading a treatise on the subject.

No thanks a lot.

I liked this book because of it's sequential and systematical analysis of human behaviour.