Richard Feldstein

Since I've been reading the secondary material about Lacan in roughly chronological order, I can say with some certainty that this book represents a dramatic shift in the discourse. In the book's first introduction - for some reason, there are two - Richard Feldstein, the book's co-editor (also two of those) notes how the 1980s brought to a close the "introductory" phase of thinking about Lacan in English-speaking circles. "[I]n the 1990s, we have entered a second phase in the transmission show more of Lacan's work," he claims. "Spearheaded by philosophical and literary activists like Slavoj Žižek and Juliet Flower MacCannell, this second wave of transmission applies Lacan's theories to cultural studies - to issues of race, gender, and class that help to delineate the boundaries of the new psychopolitical movements that are a part of the cultural ethos of our time" (p.xii).

The era of identity politics has arrived in Lacan studies, well and truly. That seems a strange thing to say, on reflection, because wasn't the primary force driving the interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis coming from feminism, both in France (Iragaray, Kristeva, Cixous) and the Anglophone world (Gallop, MacCannell, Grosz)? In spite of that, this collection of essays has an entirely different tone and style to such predecessors.

Just look at Judith Roof's essay on the paternal metaphor (a key Lacanian concept) and paternity law, which delves into all kinds of examples drawn from actual law and court cases that seem rather to strain the notion of paternity as merely a metaphor. Or Ellie Ragland's chapter on "The Discourse of the Master," undoubtedly the highlight of the collection, which seeks to explain the key difference that Lacan posits between truth and knowledge, a distinction that she elaborates in the context of the "four discourses" elaborated in Seminar XVII.

What has happened here? Why does the overall atmosphere of this book feel so substantially different to similar collections published only one or two years earlier? Certainly there is a new political dimension to this work, one that extends the work of the Lacanian feminists and deconstructionists that have gone before. The greater sophistication is also no doubt the increasing availability of Lacan's work in English, and hence a greater familiarity with the full range of his concepts. The focus is no longer on just the "structuralist" version of Lacan, but a new willingness to take on concepts of ethics, politics, and the concomitant notion of the real. There are also the efforts of people like Žižek and Joan Copjec to shift the discourse in a more revolutionary and sophisticated direction.

While all of these things are no doubt factors in what has made the tone of Lacan studies shift so dramatically, as reflected in this collection, I would argue that the biggest difference comes from the fact that Lacan's ideas have finally entered into the university discourse. The earlier commentators on Lacan, by this measure, can seem somewhat amateurish and outdated by the new standard that has been set, but there is a rawness and honesty to works like Jane Gallop's Reading Lacan or Elizabeth Grosz's Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction that is missing from this new generation of critics.

The collection's other co-editor, Willy Apollon, seems to me absurdly optimistic about the "revolutionary" potential of this new turn. "From my point of view, because I am an analyst and, secondarily, because I am Lacanian," he writes, "I think that the analyst acts as a heretic in the field of politics" (p.31). The tone of this collection suggests to me just the opposite: the increased sophistication of the discourse, the new power and pliability of Lacanian theory, its deployment as a tool of knowledge-generation, all this says to me that the hounds of Actaeon that Lacan imagined as being always on his tail have finally caught up to him, and he is finally being minced and devoured by the university discourse, just as he predicted. show less

Seminar XI was the first text by Lacan that I ever read. I still remember the photocopied pages I had from the chapters dealing with alienation and the "subject who is supposed to know," two of Lacan's very best ideas. Alongside Seminar VII (on ethics), Seminar XI is, for me, represents the very best of Lacan's work.

This collection starts off with a bang. The introduction by Jacques-Alain Miller - whom I normally don't like - is superb. Seminar XI was the first seminar that Miller attended, show more before he became Lacan's son-in-law and leading acolyte, and he recalls crucial details about the context and historical importance of that particular year for Lacan's career. More than that, Miller actually provides some genuinely crucial insights into some of the theoretical developments from that seminar, especially his comments on Lacan's innovative separation of transference and repetition. The introduction is, in short, quite brilliant, and eclipses everything else in the book.

Unfortunately, the rest of the collection is kind of a mess. What I really wanted was a contextual and critical analysis of the seminar's main ideas in a similar to what Roudinesco achieves in outlining the various intellectual influences on Lacan in her biography. Such a task would no doubt have had far more coherence if done by a single author, whereas the various authors in this book seem to take whatever angle they choose.

Some of the authors, it is true, do focus on key concepts: Éric Laurent talks about alienation and separation, for example, and Colette Soler looks at the concept of subject and other, but there is a repeated sense that these authors are just nibbling around the edges of these concepts rather than digging into them deeply.

Even less appropriate to this book, in my opinion, were the various attempts to "apply" the ideas from Lacan's seminar to outside texts, whether it was Richard Feldstein's reading of [b:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass|24213|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass|Lewis Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327872220s/24213.jpg|2375385] or Slavoj Žižek's analysis of David Lynch. Such interpretations took focus away from the actual significance of Lacan's seminar.

The other thing that was sorely missing from this collection was a discussion of the "subject who is supposed to know" - this is perhaps my favorite Lacanian concept, and a crucial one for his critique of authority, especially with regard to the analyst's desire. It is unbelievable that it was so neglected here.

Apart from Miller's excellent introduction, then, Reading Seminar XI is a true disappointment. Perhaps it was always going to be that way, given that the heterogeneity of its authors could hardly provide the coherent commentary this seminar deserves, but I suspect it could nonetheless have been done better, at least, than this. show less

In his essay on "The Politics of Impossibility" in this collection, Andrew Ross rails against François Roustang's criticism that Lacanism is founded on logic that produces little more than disciples, facsimiles, epigones. Ross may not like this claim, he may dismiss it as "extreme," but when I was reading through this collection, it was hard not to agree with Roustang's position. This book is a piece of scholarly mediocrity, a group of essays with lots of expertise but little that is show more innovative or insightful.

I am a big fan of Jane Gallop's work, but it is clear that the editors included her chapter in here simply so they could parade her name in the credits. Her contribution is slight in both topic and length - a mere four and a half pages.

The only redeeming feature of this collection is the essay by Slavoj Žižek, titled "The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis." As always, bits and pieces of this essay are recycled elsewhere in Žižek's work - the parts about Kafka, for instance, reappear almost word for word in [b:Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture|18911|Looking Awry An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture|Slavoj Žižek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347257589s/18911.jpg|20256] - but this chapter stands out like a sore thumb amidst a sea of academic dullness and mediocrity. 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