What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study (Contemporary Theory Series) Book

For a book with such an enticing title, I was enormously disappointed. How could it go so wrong? This book, after all, even won an academic award. Surely it should have more merit than this. Dutifully, I went looking for it, felt almost guilty for not finding it - and only acknowledged just how weak this book is when I saw someone else's negative review on Amazon.

The first problem with this book is that it doesn't really go anywhere. The whole thing, after all, was pieced together out of essays and lectures that Soler assembled in the 1990s, and so the whole enterprise feels like an opportunistic assemblage that gathers together texts that have only a family resemblance.

The second problem with this book is the mindset of its author, Colette Soler. In the last few days I have come across several more of her pieces in the course of my Lacanian research, and each time I have been struck by the utter blandness of her pronouncements. Soler belongs to the Jacques-Alain Miller school of Lacanian thought, which produces a dull orthodoxy that is visible in the similar work of Bruce Fink, Ellie Ragland, Stuart Scheidermann, Éric Laurent, and many other such epigones.

If you really want to know what Lacan said about women, bypass this book and read On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore instead. After that, you can go on to read the rich vein of feminist criticism of Lacan's views on women, from Gallop to Grosz, which Soler dutifully ignores.