Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud Book

Having been severely disappointed with Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 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, 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 Écrits, it is no longer necessary.

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