Bruce Fink (1)

An astoundingly clear cut elucidation of Lacanian psychoanalysis; as for the content itself I’m still uncertain of its usefulness. The same kind of reticence comes up whenever I hear Marxists try to construe their own discourse as a science, since one can always attempt to portray it as some kind of fully furnished organon. It’s the same with psychoanalysis, certainly thrilling to read through, but one is seriously sceptical of its extension into other fields (outside of being the worst show more kind of cultural/literary critic - thumbing in flaccid theory so as to reductively analyse some Lynch film). Maybe Fink will prove this intuition wrong in his Clinical Introduction, because I have been lead to believe that psychoanalysis has just about the same efficacy/success rate as CBT (even if Fink, regurgitating Lacan, sees discussions of efficacy, correcting character traits etc. as merely improving some arbitrary good instead of doing what is important, namely, dialectising the master signifier and traversing over fantasy).

I suppose that any seemingly coherent theorem (even with Lacan’s stipulations that his system not be seen as a closed economy, that there remains something ineffable at the base, the ineluctable nature of object (a), aptly referred to as Gödelian structuralism) provides a placebo, the subject-as-presumed-to-know will reign in all therapeutic fields as long as we are cowardly enough to continue to cry out for therapy.

So why choose Lacanian psychoanalysis? It seems to be the most bookish of the analytic tradition — maybe it can be seen as the best avenue toward a who’s got the biggest dick style competition between analyst and analysand to see who is more well read and intelligent (of course the analyst isn’t meant to give into this, is instead likely to cough or seem disinterested - but come on, the guy’s still human). Also.... how is one to believe in therapy, or more specifically its value? I struggle to see how all the elusiveness in the world incarnated by the analyst as analyst-becoming-the-elusive-position-of-desire could breach the dam of the analysand’s stubbornness on this one point.

I’m rambling now. Good book. show less

It is hard to rate Reading Seminar XX, which includes some of the same old names that keep turning up in every essay collection from this period. Nonetheless, this book did manage to surprise me - the first three chapters, in particular, are worth the price of admission.

The first of these three outstanding chapters is by Bruce Fink, whose work I normally dislike due to its blandness. However, Fink does an excellent in delineating the split between knowledge and desire in Lacan's theory of show more subjectivity, and how this evolves from the early period up to Seminar XX. Definitely the best piece by Fink that I have come across.

The second is an essay on hysteria by Colette Soler, whose work I like even less. Soler's chapter is not genuinely groundbreaking, but I thought its discussion of the hysteric and the way it produces knowledge/mastery was really well done.

The third and final essay is by Slavoj Žižek, who articulates the implications of the theory of the "not-all" that appears in Seminar XX. This piece is particularly important for how it anticipates the relationship between Judaism and Christianity that will be explored in [b:The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology|18916|The Neighbor Three Inquiries in Political Theology|Slavoj Žižek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328872581s/18916.jpg|20261].

The rest of the essays in this book, unfortunately, are blandly academic and not of great interest, but these three opening chapters provide some great critical insights into Seminar XX. show less

While I think Bruce Fink is a good translator of Jacques Lacan's texts, my reading of [b:Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely|85847|Lacan to the Letter Reading Écrits Closely|Bruce Fink|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347917489s/85847.jpg|82844] gave me a fairly negative view of his work as a critic and commentator. For me, Fink is too much of a disciple, and that lack of a critical distance speaks to the weakness of his arguments.

Lacan on Love didn't really change my views on show more Fink - he remains too uncritical of Lacan for his books to be genuinely groundbreaking. Nonetheless, this particular work is unquestionably useful in certain respects. For the reader who is new or unversed in Lacanian concepts, Fink is almost painstakingly gentle, giving numerous examples that walk the reader through the various psychoanalytic concepts.

Now, as an advanced reader, there is a danger that I would find this book condescending or trite, but it is to Fink's credit that I did not. There are certain concepts of Lacan's that I am still struggling to clarify or articulate, and Fink's detailed explanations helped - this was particularly true with regard to the positions of the obsessional neurotic and the hysteric. I owe my clearer understanding of these terms to this book.

The text itself is divided into four sections, with the first three dedicated to looking at love through the Lacanian registers of the symbolic, imaginary, and real.

The first section, on the symbolic, explains love through the notion of structural positions. In these situations, the relational position between lover and beloved determines the nature of the emotional investment. This can be thought, for instance, from the aforementioned perspective of neurotic and hysteric. Neurotics tend to fall in love with people who are impossible or inaccessible: thus, their love is structural, rather than an indicator of the beloved's actual qualities. Similar structures can be seen in the Oedipus complex, or in the analytical transference, where desire largely ignores who the person actually is in favor of their position in the symbolic structure.

The second section focuses on the imaginary, thus turning the attention onto the subject's primary narcissism. Fink thus explains how love might be interpreted through either the fantasies we have about others, or as a reflection of our own self-image.

While these first two sections are detailed and convincing, the third section on the real is a disappointment. Fink begins well enough, pointing to examples like repetition compulsion (where someone repeats the same traumatic pattern over and over again without understanding why) and "unsymbolizable" factors that the subject cannot identify, but this chapter is brief, vague, and unsatisfying. Fink is clearly uncomfortable with the findings of the later Lacan, the Lacan of the real that is so central to Žižek's work, and it is reflected here.

The fourth section consists of "General Considerations on Love," a title that is as nebulous as it sounds. The first part talks about how difficult it is to define love, using numerous historical and cultural to show that it is a slippery term. The second part is an in-depth reading of Seminar VIII, at the beginning of which Lacan gives a detailed reading of Plato's [b:The Symposium|81779|The Symposium|Plato|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1520522475s/81779.jpg|1488719]. If you've read Seminar VIII, you don't need to read Fink's piece-by-piece summary of it.

Overall, Lacan on Love was a book of two halves. The first two sections on the symbolic and imaginary were helpful and insightful, whereas the last two were vague and mostly unnecessary. Fink is a good, low-level commentator on Lacan's work, but as I said before, his books are never going to be genuinely groundbreaking. show less

Having been severely disappointed with [b:Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis|691228|Reading Seminar XI Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis|Richard Feldstein|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1389843286s/691228.jpg|677572], I approached this volume with some trepidation. I needn't have worried: Seminars I and II are far more accessible than XI, and so the commentators did a much better job this time around.

As in the other book, show more Jacques-Alain Miller opens the proceedings, and his self-styled "Pilgrim's Progress" of Lacan's development from out of phenomenology and existentialism is, once again, illuminating.

The second section of the book, under the title "Symbolic," has some very dull commentary by Colette Soler, Éric Laurent, and Bruce Fink, but ends with a nice piece by Anne Dunand, in which she considers the interplay between Lacan and Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The third section, "Imaginary," is only slightly less dull. I particularly dislike the final essay in this section by Richard Feldstein, which uses Lacan to rail against the tactics of the American right. While I agree with him politically, I think this kind of analysis is generally trite and misses the point at a deeper level.

The fourth section, "Real," is easily the book's strongest section. Fink is blandly awful as usual in his reading of Lacan and Poe, but Ellie Ragland's essay on the real is difficult albeit rewarding, and the extended discussion with Miller (and Žižek) about "Kant avec Sade" is really good.

The fifth section, "Clinical Perspectives," is of no interest to anyone. Surely it could have been cut to save printing costs. Seriously.

The sixth section, "Other Texts," does not contain much of interest. Maire Jaanus's essay on hatred threatens to break into something more interesting - why, oh why, didn't he revisit the joys of evil discussed by Miller and Žižek in their chapter? - but never quite finds its feet, while Žižek connects Lacan and Hegel in a way that starts out interestingly, but also falters by becoming too close too the latter, obscuring how exactly these two are "with" each other.

There is a seventh section, a translation from the Écrits, but since the publication of the complete [b:Écrits|75485|Écrits|Jacques Lacan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388239622s/75485.jpg|73021], it is no longer necessary.

Overall, this collection has some good chapters, but it hardly lives up to the insights of the original material. show less