Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety: An Introduction (The Lacanian Clinical Field)

Rating:
Summary: Don't Waste Your Money
Review: So far the English translations of Harari's work on Lacan have shown themselves to be substandard and superficial from both the perspective of psychoanalytical practice and Lacanian scholarship. Perhaps this is because they are transcriptions of seminars he gave, rather than written texts carefully worked over and developed. In short, Harari's work would benefit from some careful editorial work, integrating more concrete textual references-- for instance, actually quoting text relevant text --and spending more time developing a context for the arguments he's articulating. Harari simply lacks the speaking skills that Lacan himself possessed. Harari often contents himself with simply restating what Lacan [presumably] says in seminar X and XXIII, giving little or no commentary or conceptual analysis. This point should have already been evident in Harari's reading of seminar X which required a seventy page introduction by Shepherdson in order to situate Harari's work. Such a lengthy introduction suggests that the work itself is not doing its job, and this point is demonstrated by a reading of the text, which, while replete with Lacanian diagrams, has very little of interest to say about them that couldn't already be gathered from other seminars. When Harari does engage in commentary his points are often trite, focusing on irrelevant trivia-- and sometimes hero worship? --rather carefully developing Lacanian concepts in light of the greater body of his thought. This annoying tendency is especially clear in his analysis of seminar XXIII, which spends more time rambling on in a rather romantic way about Joyce, rather than focusing on the novel new concepts that Lacan there develops. Harari's text would be defensible if it provided us with a brilliant and novel reading of Joyce in Lacanian terms, but it does not even manage that in that it restricts itself to the most superficial observations of Joycian texts... Observations that are immediately evident to anyone who has even the most rudimentary knowledge of contemporary literary theory. All of this produces a rather comic effect when Harari tells us that he is attempting to correct the rampant misreadings of Lacan promulgated by the Millerian school. How can you correct a misreading if you barely offer a reading yourself? It is likely that those curious about Lacan's unpublished seminars will continue to buy his work; but such people would do better to save their money and either read these texts in the French themselves or await their translations.