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

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Summary: contains in-depth study of human psychology
Review: I liked this book because of it's sequential and systematical analysis of human behaviour.

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Summary: There's such a thing as One
Review: 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)

Rating:
Summary: There's such a thing as One
Review: 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)

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Summary: This is an excellent translation of a key Lacan text.
Review: 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.