Customer Reviews

Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture

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To give credit where it's due, Felman can be a careful and compassionate reader. Apart from some moments in its final chapter, however, this volume gives little indication. The "insights" wrested from its pages can be summed up as follows: every interpretive act is an act of reading; all reading is performative; knowledge -- especially self-knowledge -- isn't transparent. Even if these ideas are new to you, you're still better off reading Henry James or watching Hitchcock.

More seriously: Felman's thinking and writing teaches bad habits. The overuse, for instance, of hyperbolic or overdetermined terms -- "radical" and "stakes" and "precisely," "language" and "trauma" and "reading" -- that need to be unpacked and justified if they're still to have any meaning, but which Felman leaves on the loose. The reliance on italicization of font rather than force of prose to mark emphasis. A mystification of the obvious, which we're asked to accept unquestioningly given the always-already of repetition or some such hallowed platitude. And more generally the passing off of redundancy for complexity, vocabulary shortage for austerity. Short of "adventure," this book leaves its less discerning readers with the delusion that they, too, can exalt the elliptical and call it "insight." If you want a consistently excellent introduction to Lacan, I strongly recommend the one by Malcolm Bowie instead.

Never has there been such a display of the radical understanding of psychoanalysis beyond that which Lacan has left us. Felman brilliantly, lucidly, synthesizes Freud, Lacan, Literature, and Clinical practice into a model of understanding that can be understood, but not so easily written about. Felman has found that spot where language fails, and where the human experience stops making sense to us--and she makes sense of it with her language. Truly a transcendent work of genius and insight. A warning - this book deals with the highest stakes of psychoanalysis, and if understood well enough, it can have a profound effect on the reader. Approach Felman with caution.

A sophisticated explication of Lacan's reading of the unconscious through a Heideggerian lense.