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Lacan: Topologically Speaking

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yet another book on Lacan that stops well short of what it claims to deliver. This haphazard collection of essays continues to promote authors who pay homage to Lacan's 'style' of language. It doesn't work in English, for cultural and practical reasons. You can't work from neologism and jargon, and explain using metaphors. Promises in any of these essays to further clarify Lacan's difficult theories inevitably short-circuit into grammatical circularities in which one piece of jargon is explained by another. How many times do we have to read about the suture of the subject of the cut of the suture, which in itself is a topology of the subject of the cut of the lack? No one in this collection would seem to agree that the sign of maturity of a theoretical discipline is that its elaboration may be carried out over time in simpler and simpler terms. It is not clear what application these explanations of topological figures has to the actual treatment of patients, or even to the signifier. All the reader can expect is to have a cross-cap or a Mobius strip demonstrated, and then to read glib lines like "One sees there that the signifier, in redoubling itself, only grasps a void, homogeneous with the field exterior to the signifier, and the subject designates itself there as an excluded field" (84). As if the reader has succeeded in making the jump from topology to phonemics all by herself. Isn't the very point of this volume to cross this very territory? The link between the signifier and topology is constantly 'elided' by the authors of this volume; let alone the link between Lacanian theory and the psychoanalytic session, which becomes this 'gap', 'cut', or 'void' that these authors perseverate in venerating.

On a more practical note, the tradition of spelling errors, poor editing (1988 for 1978, p.ix), continues in this volume. For some reason, Sheridan's Ecrits translation is favored over Fink's, despite its numerous errors. The relative pronoun 'which' is constantly preferred over 'that', despite the presence of independent or dependent clauses; and so on. It's a particular style of negligent editing that is sure to continue the stigma of impenetrability that has haunted Lacan's work in English since the 1980's, when the academic-cum-stoner (em)bracing of the want-to-not-know (in)fected every (re)ference to Lacan with deliberate mental fog. The biggest shame of this volume is that it seems to evidence a disappointing trend in the more clinically-oriented authors: that they are doing nothing to clarify matters so that the Lacanian clinic may come into its own.