oskhen's review against another edition
5.0
"The unconscious is structured like a language."
This book marks my first encounter with not only Lacan, but the field of psychoanalysis and especially that of semiotics. Although it proved immensely difficult, I stand by the notion that in order to learn how to swim one should immerse themselves in water, 'just dive in'. It's characteristic of a great thinker to challenge predetermined views and as such to really cut into the foundation of how you relate to the world, and Lacan has done nothing if not this. Although his language is often dismissed as pretentious obscurantism, once grasped the sheer scale and boldness of it is astonishing, and it's honestly at the core of what is offered. In order to try and explain what I mean by this, I will travel by means of my own experience.
I knew from the start that this reading would require serious effort, and as such I started documenting concepts brought up chronologically, partially by quotation but mostly trying to grasp what is approached in my own words and by way of other references. This quickly proved to be futile, because Lacan abhors definitions, finding them too constraining. Not only that, there is no chronology either. Everything is extremely intertwined and as such concepts are mentioned in passing which won't be elaborated on until way later and the experience of reading is as of being led in the dark, only possible by way of blind trust. Nevertheless, one finds that the entire structure mirrors precisely what is being approached. To be precise, his seminar communicates in the same way as the unconscious; it is allusive, circumscribing, never pinpointing anything exactly. It is poetic, deeply enigmatic, and in it's unique way beautiful.
I am not arrogant enough to summarize, but there are a few things that I at least want to touch upon. First of all it's the way the subject is slighted. He is born into the world, into culture, without any sort of primacy, determined by the Other, by signifiers, by language, which existed long before he came and will continue to do so long after he is gone. His desire is determined by the Other, "Man's desire is the desire of the Other." He does not even exist on a deeper level unconsciously, because the unconscious is transindividual. In short, the subject is stuck in the structure of language, existing solely as an effect of signifiers. "It is not that I speak, but that I am being spoken." He is merely an opportunity for the communication of the unconscious. Intellectually it can be accepted, but emotionally it's terrifying "because it forces one to think that the subject is not alienated due to having extracted something from himself, but that this is the cost of becoming part of the herd."
This seminar was primarily held for aspiring psychoanalysts, in order for them to be taught. As someone who is far from fitting into such a description, it begs the question as to the value to be found compared to the immense effort required to penetrate Lacan's notorious difficulty. As someone interested in philosophy, the value is found in his structures. His concepts are, although based in Freudianism, undoubtedly his own. He goes to long lengths to build them from the ground up (not to be confused with chronologically), with rich references to a broad spectrum of philosophical works. They are, as it turns out, extremely valuable for navigating not only the psyche but the world in general, for what is our relation to the world if not through our minds?
"The privilege of the subject seems to be ..., as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me. This is how the world is struck with a presumption of idealization".
There is neither time nor space to flesh out even a fraction of what I would like to say on Lacan, but the last thing I have to mention is his relation to that of mysticism. He has, far more than anybody else I've read, conceptualized the existence of the subject and the world in which he finds himself. For Lacan, there is nothing for the subject outside of language, the Real being wholly unapproachable. Anything even remotely close to that of something akin to self-actualization, of the reconquering of human agency, seems impossible. As such, it has to be sought beyond the subject, reinforcing the age-old wisdom "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."
This book marks my first encounter with not only Lacan, but the field of psychoanalysis and especially that of semiotics. Although it proved immensely difficult, I stand by the notion that in order to learn how to swim one should immerse themselves in water, 'just dive in'. It's characteristic of a great thinker to challenge predetermined views and as such to really cut into the foundation of how you relate to the world, and Lacan has done nothing if not this. Although his language is often dismissed as pretentious obscurantism, once grasped the sheer scale and boldness of it is astonishing, and it's honestly at the core of what is offered. In order to try and explain what I mean by this, I will travel by means of my own experience.
I knew from the start that this reading would require serious effort, and as such I started documenting concepts brought up chronologically, partially by quotation but mostly trying to grasp what is approached in my own words and by way of other references. This quickly proved to be futile, because Lacan abhors definitions, finding them too constraining. Not only that, there is no chronology either. Everything is extremely intertwined and as such concepts are mentioned in passing which won't be elaborated on until way later and the experience of reading is as of being led in the dark, only possible by way of blind trust. Nevertheless, one finds that the entire structure mirrors precisely what is being approached. To be precise, his seminar communicates in the same way as the unconscious; it is allusive, circumscribing, never pinpointing anything exactly. It is poetic, deeply enigmatic, and in it's unique way beautiful.
I am not arrogant enough to summarize, but there are a few things that I at least want to touch upon. First of all it's the way the subject is slighted. He is born into the world, into culture, without any sort of primacy, determined by the Other, by signifiers, by language, which existed long before he came and will continue to do so long after he is gone. His desire is determined by the Other, "Man's desire is the desire of the Other." He does not even exist on a deeper level unconsciously, because the unconscious is transindividual. In short, the subject is stuck in the structure of language, existing solely as an effect of signifiers. "It is not that I speak, but that I am being spoken." He is merely an opportunity for the communication of the unconscious. Intellectually it can be accepted, but emotionally it's terrifying "because it forces one to think that the subject is not alienated due to having extracted something from himself, but that this is the cost of becoming part of the herd."
This seminar was primarily held for aspiring psychoanalysts, in order for them to be taught. As someone who is far from fitting into such a description, it begs the question as to the value to be found compared to the immense effort required to penetrate Lacan's notorious difficulty. As someone interested in philosophy, the value is found in his structures. His concepts are, although based in Freudianism, undoubtedly his own. He goes to long lengths to build them from the ground up (not to be confused with chronologically), with rich references to a broad spectrum of philosophical works. They are, as it turns out, extremely valuable for navigating not only the psyche but the world in general, for what is our relation to the world if not through our minds?
"The privilege of the subject seems to be ..., as soon as I perceive, my representations belong to me. This is how the world is struck with a presumption of idealization".
There is neither time nor space to flesh out even a fraction of what I would like to say on Lacan, but the last thing I have to mention is his relation to that of mysticism. He has, far more than anybody else I've read, conceptualized the existence of the subject and the world in which he finds himself. For Lacan, there is nothing for the subject outside of language, the Real being wholly unapproachable. Anything even remotely close to that of something akin to self-actualization, of the reconquering of human agency, seems impossible. As such, it has to be sought beyond the subject, reinforcing the age-old wisdom "The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao."
asher__s's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
medium-paced
5.0
Why are people reading Lacan and complaining about how difficult it is? Lacan is known for being abstruse… I would venture to say a fair portion of the enjoyment of reading Lacan is the difficulty it forces you to cope with. There are wonderful secondary texts you can read instead of dealing with the man himself (see Bruce Fink, Mari Ruti, Zizek I suppose, Todd McGowan, etc.)
diegokmenendez's review against another edition
3.0
uhhhhhhh i cant rlly say i actually understood that much. Like, i did not get anything out of it.
casparb's review against another edition
Lacan remains for me just so difficult I've read a whole bunch on him now and I'm getting there! In dribs and drabs but it's still so gradual & it's a series of lectures designed for practising psychoanalysts with doctorates and so on so we Are Complicated. Anyway not all there for me but maybe rereads would help. Loving the writing on Love and the famous 'gift of shit' near the end. Also very plausible unravelling of the Unreal. Amazing melodrama of 'Hegeliano-Marxism' [thus!] producing a 'dark god'. Nice aside on Spinoza on the same page.
for how can one name a desire? One circumscribes a desire. There's a sense in which reading this book feels like circumscription but perhaps it will agglutinate for me I'm still going. Reminded me to read the Wolf-Man if nothing else
for how can one name a desire? One circumscribes a desire. There's a sense in which reading this book feels like circumscription but perhaps it will agglutinate for me I'm still going. Reminded me to read the Wolf-Man if nothing else
andreaschari's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
3.0
georglowinger's review against another edition
4.0
First review - Rating:1 star
To say this is addressed to nonspeicalists, and relies on references to extremely obscure authors like Cornelius Agrippa and references work by Merleau-Ponty (which I doubt many nonspeicalists have read) is ridiculous! How is anybody going to understand this? Even the vague references to dreams sampled from Freud's magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams are mentioned in passing with very little semblance to their actual elucidation. Whilst authors like Zizek, Copjec, Bruce Fink and others seem to be able to pull apart the theory from the abstruse style, I cannot.
I will perhaps return to this work, but for now it's contents remains a mystery to me.
2nd Reading - "The art of listening is almost as important as that of saying the right thing" (123)
Okay, so Lacan is pretty fucking difficult, that's a given. Below I'll post my summary of the sections of the seminar, and I hope people can chip in in the comments and provide me with some help understanding the great master. I can only apologise for any vagaries and gaps in knowledge.
In this set of seminars, conducted in 1964, Lacan tries to get at the heart of what Psychoanalysis is. For Lacan, Psychoanalysis is rooted in four, Freudian concepts - the unconscious, repetition, transference and finally the drive. The lectures are then set out in these four themes, with a set of lectures devoted to one of the four aspects, all bar the first lecture, 'Excommunication'.
Excommunication - Lacan explains why psychoanalysis is a science, despite the analytic community oftentimes being similar to a religious community, which excommunicates heretics. Lacan of course was excommunicated by the IPA for his insistence on variable length sessions, and Lacan was also famously interrupted by Ernest Jones, when Lacan was delivering the early version of 'The Mirror Stage'. Unfortunately, for Lacan, despite this lecture, the Lacanian community has become more cultish than the community he was criticising, with the longstanding beef between Freudian revisionists of varying shades (characterised by the legacy of Melanie Klein, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm) and the classical Freudians (characterised by folks like Anna Freud) still brewing around this time. Lacan is reflective on his own excommunication in this essay however, drawing similarities between his expulsion from the IPA to Baruch Spinozas excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Whilst Lacan pushes back against the claim that the psychoanalytic community "is a church" (4), he does want to rescue the four concepts from the analytic community's abandoment of them, and instead carry the Freudian torch, by taking it and highlighting how Freudianism fits with modern linguistics.
The Unconscious and Repetition -"The linguistic structure assures us that there is, beneath the term unconscious, something definable, accessible and objectifiable" (21)
"Man's desire is the desire of the Other" (36)
This set of lectures draws on the themes of the title, with Lacan pushing back against the accusations of him being a Heideggerian due to his linguistic focus. For Lacan, the unconscious "thinks in our place" and situates our subjectivity, in a very similar way to Heidegger's arguments about Being and its relation to language (remember Lacan's repetition of Heidegger's famous statement that "In language man dwells".
Lacan here wants to question our ideas around truth also, with him rejecting playing with the idea of there being "truth in lying" (38). He appears to be trying to reveal the truth inherent in speech, or the unconscious, which is expressed through language. For example, if I were to lie about my sexual performance, the 'truth' behind this statement is that unconsciously I hold a deep seated insecurity about my sexual performance, and this truth would only be revealed through analysis.
Whilst analysis gets at this Other, this 'unconscious' we speak of, it does so not in an idealist manner. In fact, Lacan aggressively rejects the notion of idealism in psychoanalysis, something which isn't helped by Freud's talk of mental representations (Vorstellungsrepresentanz), which reads almost Berkeleyan at times. No, analysis is not idealism for Lacan, because its praxis is "orientated towards... the heart of experience" (54). The real is an in itself, apprehended through analysis of signs, like unveiling a mask or filtering out a chemical from a mixture. This kind of claim I can only attribute to Lacan's interest in phenomenology, wherein experience is interpreted through a realist perspective, without the kind of mechanical materialist outlook, nor a leap of faith - a la Descartes, another figure which Lacan speaks through in these lectures.
One of the key ideas in this section of lectures is the idea of 'the tuche', which is an Aristotelian term for apprehending the Real. The Real is beyond simple 'return', as Freud's dictum of the return of the repressed tells us, things don't happen again as identical events. Rather, they return in a fragmented and confused manner.
On the Gaze as Object Petit a - "Man's desire is the desire of the Other"
Here, in this set of lectures, Lacan attempts to explain his ideas on the Gaze, and distance himself from Merleau Ponty's and Sartre's phenomenology. For Lacan, the gaze is not a literal, real gaze like that of Sartre's (think of the example of a peeping tom being caught in Being and Nothingness), but rather it is for Lacan an imagined gaze, a gaze "imagined in me by the Other" (84). Lacan then discusses his ideas around the gaze with some illustrations and discussions of geometry and topology. The gaze is represented through art, a theme which has been picked up on my film and art theorists in the Lacanian tradition (see Zizek and Copjec). The eye, for Lacan, may act as an object petit a, insofar as it involves "lack" (104). This objet a is a the object cause of desire, the Other which is evident through the gaze. Simply put, it is that which we cannot attain, the 'apple of the eye'.
Transference and the Drive - "I will ask analysts this: 'have you ever felt, for a single moment, the feeling that you are handling a clay on influence?'" (126).
These lectures see Lacan shifting his focus to rejecting Szasz's attack on transference, with Lacan standing stubbornly in favour of the idea that transference doesn't require a subject-presumed-to-know. Here, we can see Lacan's idea of the analyst acting as a mirror for the analysand, and being a tool for the analysand, rather than an authoritative figure, like that of Winnicott's parent model of analysis, which is vital to the Lacanian approach, and provides a much more non-hierarchical approach which is too often overlooked.
Cormac Gallagher explains this very well in his summary notes of the seminar, noting "The concern with the scientific nature of psychoanalysis had occupied
many analysts since Freud and one of Lacan's principal interlocutors in this
and other Seminars, Thomas Szasz, argued that it could only achieve this
status by conforming to the objective norms of the physical sciences. In
particular Szasz felt that the whole notion of the transference, which
consisted for him in deliberately leading the analysand into error and then
correcting him on the basis of the analyst's superior knowledge, had to be
abandoned in favour of an honest reciprocity between the two people in the
analytic situation. Lacan's wager is that he can construct a science which does not
abandon the fundamental tenets of analysis, for example, that it involves one
person who is suffering coming to address himself to another subject who is
presumed to know. To accept Szasz's proposition that psychoanalysis is a
science only if it has objective realities against which there can be measured
the correctness of the analyst's as opposed to the analysand's statements is to
reduce psychoanalysis to some sort of cognitive-behavioural therapy and
eliminate any reference to the four concepts that ground its theory and
practice." (see LACAN'S SUMMARY OF SEMINAR XI* pg9 by Cormac Gallagher)
Part of the focus on transference through speech also leads Lacan to separating the "enunciation" from the "statement", wherein he spearates the signifiers from their Unconscious meaning.
I - Am lying to you. Again, think back to Lacan's critique of simplistic notions of truth as being different to the truth in analysis, and also Lacan's critique of the Cartesian 'I'.
Repeating his famous dictum that "the unconscious is structured like a language", Lacan attacks Carl Jung's desexualisation of the libido and his idea that the solution to the unconscious it to be found in history, with some primitive mental ideas.
Related to this, Lacan also takes aims at the translation of Freud's 'drive', which Lacan sees as problematising the actual idea itself in the minds of many analysts. This is something Lacan devotes a whole ecrit to in the full collection of the Ecrits.
The Field of the Other and back to Transference - "Not wanting to desire is wanting to not desire " (253).
This set of lectures has a very Hegelian focus, with Lacan exploring the notions of Being, alienation and separation in a way which holds a great (albeit acknowledged) debt to Hegel. Alienation occurs with the sliding of signifiers, and anaphinis is explored as a consequence of the death of the subject. Whilst signifiers are empty and have no relation to themselves, rather they take meaning when imbued with a "pure non-meaning" at the root (251).
Much of this section remains fairly impenetrable, and my deficiency in Hegel only adds to this.
Conclusion - Lacan concludes, circling back to largely the same things he said in the first couple of lectures, rounding up discussing the scientificity of Psychoanalysis which proceeds from, not science, but "science itself".
To say this is addressed to nonspeicalists, and relies on references to extremely obscure authors like Cornelius Agrippa and references work by Merleau-Ponty (which I doubt many nonspeicalists have read) is ridiculous! How is anybody going to understand this? Even the vague references to dreams sampled from Freud's magnum opus The Interpretation of Dreams are mentioned in passing with very little semblance to their actual elucidation. Whilst authors like Zizek, Copjec, Bruce Fink and others seem to be able to pull apart the theory from the abstruse style, I cannot.
I will perhaps return to this work, but for now it's contents remains a mystery to me.
2nd Reading - "The art of listening is almost as important as that of saying the right thing" (123)
Okay, so Lacan is pretty fucking difficult, that's a given. Below I'll post my summary of the sections of the seminar, and I hope people can chip in in the comments and provide me with some help understanding the great master. I can only apologise for any vagaries and gaps in knowledge.
In this set of seminars, conducted in 1964, Lacan tries to get at the heart of what Psychoanalysis is. For Lacan, Psychoanalysis is rooted in four, Freudian concepts - the unconscious, repetition, transference and finally the drive. The lectures are then set out in these four themes, with a set of lectures devoted to one of the four aspects, all bar the first lecture, 'Excommunication'.
Excommunication - Lacan explains why psychoanalysis is a science, despite the analytic community oftentimes being similar to a religious community, which excommunicates heretics. Lacan of course was excommunicated by the IPA for his insistence on variable length sessions, and Lacan was also famously interrupted by Ernest Jones, when Lacan was delivering the early version of 'The Mirror Stage'. Unfortunately, for Lacan, despite this lecture, the Lacanian community has become more cultish than the community he was criticising, with the longstanding beef between Freudian revisionists of varying shades (characterised by the legacy of Melanie Klein, Karen Horney and Erich Fromm) and the classical Freudians (characterised by folks like Anna Freud) still brewing around this time. Lacan is reflective on his own excommunication in this essay however, drawing similarities between his expulsion from the IPA to Baruch Spinozas excommunication from the Jewish community in Amsterdam. Whilst Lacan pushes back against the claim that the psychoanalytic community "is a church" (4), he does want to rescue the four concepts from the analytic community's abandoment of them, and instead carry the Freudian torch, by taking it and highlighting how Freudianism fits with modern linguistics.
The Unconscious and Repetition -"The linguistic structure assures us that there is, beneath the term unconscious, something definable, accessible and objectifiable" (21)
"Man's desire is the desire of the Other" (36)
This set of lectures draws on the themes of the title, with Lacan pushing back against the accusations of him being a Heideggerian due to his linguistic focus. For Lacan, the unconscious "thinks in our place" and situates our subjectivity, in a very similar way to Heidegger's arguments about Being and its relation to language (remember Lacan's repetition of Heidegger's famous statement that "In language man dwells".
Lacan here wants to question our ideas around truth also, with him rejecting playing with the idea of there being "truth in lying" (38). He appears to be trying to reveal the truth inherent in speech, or the unconscious, which is expressed through language. For example, if I were to lie about my sexual performance, the 'truth' behind this statement is that unconsciously I hold a deep seated insecurity about my sexual performance, and this truth would only be revealed through analysis.
Whilst analysis gets at this Other, this 'unconscious' we speak of, it does so not in an idealist manner. In fact, Lacan aggressively rejects the notion of idealism in psychoanalysis, something which isn't helped by Freud's talk of mental representations (Vorstellungsrepresentanz), which reads almost Berkeleyan at times. No, analysis is not idealism for Lacan, because its praxis is "orientated towards... the heart of experience" (54). The real is an in itself, apprehended through analysis of signs, like unveiling a mask or filtering out a chemical from a mixture. This kind of claim I can only attribute to Lacan's interest in phenomenology, wherein experience is interpreted through a realist perspective, without the kind of mechanical materialist outlook, nor a leap of faith - a la Descartes, another figure which Lacan speaks through in these lectures.
One of the key ideas in this section of lectures is the idea of 'the tuche', which is an Aristotelian term for apprehending the Real. The Real is beyond simple 'return', as Freud's dictum of the return of the repressed tells us, things don't happen again as identical events. Rather, they return in a fragmented and confused manner.
On the Gaze as Object Petit a - "Man's desire is the desire of the Other"
Here, in this set of lectures, Lacan attempts to explain his ideas on the Gaze, and distance himself from Merleau Ponty's and Sartre's phenomenology. For Lacan, the gaze is not a literal, real gaze like that of Sartre's (think of the example of a peeping tom being caught in Being and Nothingness), but rather it is for Lacan an imagined gaze, a gaze "imagined in me by the Other" (84). Lacan then discusses his ideas around the gaze with some illustrations and discussions of geometry and topology. The gaze is represented through art, a theme which has been picked up on my film and art theorists in the Lacanian tradition (see Zizek and Copjec). The eye, for Lacan, may act as an object petit a, insofar as it involves "lack" (104). This objet a is a the object cause of desire, the Other which is evident through the gaze. Simply put, it is that which we cannot attain, the 'apple of the eye'.
Transference and the Drive - "I will ask analysts this: 'have you ever felt, for a single moment, the feeling that you are handling a clay on influence?'" (126).
These lectures see Lacan shifting his focus to rejecting Szasz's attack on transference, with Lacan standing stubbornly in favour of the idea that transference doesn't require a subject-presumed-to-know. Here, we can see Lacan's idea of the analyst acting as a mirror for the analysand, and being a tool for the analysand, rather than an authoritative figure, like that of Winnicott's parent model of analysis, which is vital to the Lacanian approach, and provides a much more non-hierarchical approach which is too often overlooked.
Cormac Gallagher explains this very well in his summary notes of the seminar, noting "The concern with the scientific nature of psychoanalysis had occupied
many analysts since Freud and one of Lacan's principal interlocutors in this
and other Seminars, Thomas Szasz, argued that it could only achieve this
status by conforming to the objective norms of the physical sciences. In
particular Szasz felt that the whole notion of the transference, which
consisted for him in deliberately leading the analysand into error and then
correcting him on the basis of the analyst's superior knowledge, had to be
abandoned in favour of an honest reciprocity between the two people in the
analytic situation. Lacan's wager is that he can construct a science which does not
abandon the fundamental tenets of analysis, for example, that it involves one
person who is suffering coming to address himself to another subject who is
presumed to know. To accept Szasz's proposition that psychoanalysis is a
science only if it has objective realities against which there can be measured
the correctness of the analyst's as opposed to the analysand's statements is to
reduce psychoanalysis to some sort of cognitive-behavioural therapy and
eliminate any reference to the four concepts that ground its theory and
practice." (see LACAN'S SUMMARY OF SEMINAR XI* pg9 by Cormac Gallagher)
Part of the focus on transference through speech also leads Lacan to separating the "enunciation" from the "statement", wherein he spearates the signifiers from their Unconscious meaning.
I - Am lying to you. Again, think back to Lacan's critique of simplistic notions of truth as being different to the truth in analysis, and also Lacan's critique of the Cartesian 'I'.
Repeating his famous dictum that "the unconscious is structured like a language", Lacan attacks Carl Jung's desexualisation of the libido and his idea that the solution to the unconscious it to be found in history, with some primitive mental ideas.
Related to this, Lacan also takes aims at the translation of Freud's 'drive', which Lacan sees as problematising the actual idea itself in the minds of many analysts. This is something Lacan devotes a whole ecrit to in the full collection of the Ecrits.
The Field of the Other and back to Transference - "Not wanting to desire is wanting to not desire " (253).
This set of lectures has a very Hegelian focus, with Lacan exploring the notions of Being, alienation and separation in a way which holds a great (albeit acknowledged) debt to Hegel. Alienation occurs with the sliding of signifiers, and anaphinis is explored as a consequence of the death of the subject. Whilst signifiers are empty and have no relation to themselves, rather they take meaning when imbued with a "pure non-meaning" at the root (251).
Much of this section remains fairly impenetrable, and my deficiency in Hegel only adds to this.
Conclusion - Lacan concludes, circling back to largely the same things he said in the first couple of lectures, rounding up discussing the scientificity of Psychoanalysis which proceeds from, not science, but "science itself".
skttrbrn's review against another edition
1.0
Having only been exposed to Lacan via Žižek and (the near-useless) Introducing Lacan, I figured I'd go to the source to gain a deeper knowledge of his concepts. To my disappointment, I found this book to be almost but not quite entirely incomprehensible. No sooner would a concept begin to gain clarity and momentum like a bubble rising to the surface, than it would burst in an effervescent cloud of gas - leaving me no more enlightened than when I began.
littlelibraryreviews's review against another edition
I can not accurately communicate the pain this book caused me while reading it through a star rating
More...