A review by javorstein
How to Read Lacan by Slavoj Žižek

1.0

Frankly a pretty terrible book. Not only does it hardly serve as an introduction to any of Lacan's ideas (which its title at least suggests it will try to do), it picks from among the most obscure passages of Lacan and uses the most obscure and bizarre examples to enact Žižek's attempt at cultural critique. This 'cultural critique' almost never includes any kind of substantive line of argumentation (reading the book feels like jumping from one example to another with no transition and no overlying argument), and most critiques Žižek makes come more in the form of "people think that [thing] works this way, but what if it was actually the opposite?" The "what if" is almost never substantiated: most of the time he just posits hypotheticals and relies on the reader to say "Yeah, that sounds reasonable" instead of making grounded claims. It ends up just sounding like bad pop-Hegelian cultural critique that vaguely uses concepts from Lacan to justify his weak "but what if it was actually the opposite?" theorizing. Chapters 4 and 5 are, I'd say, the only ones worth reading at all. This book read like a Mark Fisher blog but with less coherent points. Anyone who's looking for a guide on 'how to read Lacan' should look literally anywhere else than here (I recommend Bruce Fink).