Customer Reviews

Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (Suny Series, Insinuations: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Literature)

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In this book, Russell Grigg, who has rendered exemplary translations of Seminar III and XVII, collects eleven wonderfully written essays. Grigg is not only a translator of Lacan's, he is also a practising analyst and a trained philosopher. That background gives his texts a clearity and exactness that is sorely missing in much of the literature. That Grigg is clear and exact does not mean that his writing is easy. In fact, though many of his essays are short, I found myself going over and over them to try and grasp the difficult ideas he was handling so precisely.

As this book is essentially a collection of essays, I recommend it, highly, to those who are already well versed in Lacan and psychoanalysis. For these readers, Grigg's book will provide fascinating reading that is both informative and polemical (he offers correctives to Fink, Badiou, and Zizek). If you have some background and are curious about a certain concept, for example, foreclosure, then I recommend getting this book and then refering to the exact chapter that deals with your question. If you are completely new, this book maybe a bit of a leap into a cold pool--I recommend starting with Fink's Clinical Introduction and The Lacanian Subject.

Along with Fink, Grigg is one of Lacan's most attentive and faithful of Lacan's translators. As a result, I am always interested to know their take on Lacan's texts. This book is intruiging for that fact alone. However, in the end, I gave this book only four stars because while the essays collected here are excellent and very interesting in themselves, unlike Fink's books, Grigg's essays do not cohere into the book form. (Take the very last comment for what it is worth, since I am fully aware it is a comment of taste.)