Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture)

Rating:
Summary: precisely
Review: A collection of seminars given by many of the most prominent Lacanians, this book is ESSENTIAL reading for anyone who claims to know anything about Lacan (this includes you, Lit. professors). The exposition is clear and elegant and makes for a damned rewarding read.

Rating:
Summary: Read this book before Ecrits.
Review: A collection of seminars given by many of the most prominent Lacanians, this book is ESSENTIAL reading for anyone who claims to know anything about Lacan (this includes you, Lit. professors). The exposition is clear and elegant and makes for a damned rewarding read.

Rating:
Summary: precisely
Review: I want to stress how right on the mark the previous reviewer is regarding his comment that literature professors, and especially comparative literature professors, should do their HOMEWORK before they proclaim to "teach" Lacan in their seminars. Bruce Fink's work is indispensable, as is this volume.

While I have no truck with Lacanian psychoanalysis, and prefer Andre Green's post-Lacanian work that stresses object-relations, it is still essential to get Lacan's concepts straight: without this one can't even begin to judge all the other authors who write "under the influence of Lacan." And they are legion. And they make egregious mistakes.

The same principle of HOMEWORK applies to Jacques Derrida's work. Literature professors profess to "teach" Derrida's work, but have never done the necessary research into the subject of the history of writing that is the very ground and terrain that Derrida poses his critique of transcendental phenomenology through (in Of Grammatology, in Voice and Phenomena, and in his foreword to his translation of Husserl's Origin of Geometry). Derrida's critique carries all the more force because he remains true to the principles of transcendental phenomenology, and therefore reaches its limits from working within its own presuppositions, a method which leads him to coin the concept of the "quasi-transcendental" (a variation on and revision of Kant): this concept is the basis of Derrida's famous critique of Lacan's notions of the subject, desire, presence, etc. And yet there is no book in print that has ever critically studied Derrida's use of writing systems as the lens or critical lever to pose all of these questions through in his goal of denuding the enormously influential cultural concept of "the voice as presence." Most Derrida scholars, such as Geoff Bennington (a superb literary scholar and Derrida expert), obviate and discount the idea that Derrida's early interrogation of writing systems influences his entire thought, and follow the party line that it is simply a third term like any other that Derrida employs: supplement, hymen, originary difference, originary technics, etc. Absolutely no critical work has been published on whether Derrida's use of writing systems inflects his thought, and forms a blindspot in his "philosophy." Bruce Fink does precisely this kind of critical work in his various excellent studies of Lacanian psychoanalysis; and his editorial work in this book is of great help. One wishes that the same critical work would be published by Derrida scholars, most particularly because Derrida has been painted as an obtuse and opaque writer, just as Jacques Lacan has. But Derrida's trajectory is actually far simpler to grasp than is Lacan's, so long as one understands that Derrida is taking his directions and influence from very particular concepts in the history of philosophy. As soon as one knows what those are, Derrida's thought is clear as a bell (his writing style is deliberately indirect, because it is the only way one can approach these concepts that are so entrenched in our cultural and philosophical heritage). In contrast, Lacan's thought will always need extensive footnoting, because Lacan, as opposed to Derrida, is deliberately opaque: that is his method of teaching his version of psychoanalysis in his seminars. It is as if he has appropiated the Zen principle of teaching through confronting the student with a conundrum that is counter-intuitive. The difference however is crucial: the Zen Master will explain the conundrum, whereas Lacan places himself in the position of The Absolute Master (the title of Mikkel Borch-Jakobsen's groundbreaking critical examination of Lacan and Hegel), which he terms "the subject who is supposed to know." Lacan's point is that knowledge of the Real is never reached, and he himself is removed from the position of Master even in his own lectures. And this principle of Lacan's seminars is why Bruce Fink's clarificatory inspection of their transcriptions is so necessary.