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

The average rating for Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-03-22 00:00:00 Joshua Murray "If you are looking for a debasement of humanity, read Lacan." - Miller I am, so I do. And I read others' readings, as witness this. Miller's introductory lectures provide a comprehensive overview'bordering on the facile, but maybe he just makes it look easy'of Lacan's trajectory prior to 1953, retracing the movement from a hermeneutics of the Imaginary to a philosophically supple inflection of structuralism. With the exception of "On Perversion" (which is actually a studious condensation of two lectures) all of Miller's contributions here are surprisingly approachable, non-technical commentaries, emphasizing historical context and connections rather than arcane exegesis. Miller often appears to be intent on paving a bowdlerized path to understanding his polished version of Lacan… It is worth keeping in mind throughout this collection that most of the texts are actually speeches by French analysts delivered in English during a conference aimed at introducing Lacan to the English. Soler's four contributions opening the Symbolic section are commendably lucid summaries, helping orient newcomers and establish the requisites for conversant Lacanese. Nothing too strenuous if you've done the heavy lifting, but good exercise nonetheless. At this point I still appreciate reiterations by others of things I'm supposed to know. Laurent's section on Oedipus takes a more mathematical approach to the myth, something I'm less adept with, hence the notion of isolating and denuding the combinatory of meaning itself was given a new valence for me. He outlines the momentous points of traversing the fantasy, undertaking subjective destitution, and finally the liberation of the purely syntactic elements of meaning. Fink's entry, "The Subject and the Other's Desire," hits all the high notes from a familiar yet difficult song and in such a mellifluous voice I'm grateful for the chance to hear new resonances. Especially noteworthy is his trenchant recounting of the emergence of $, S1, S2, and objet a from the nascent subject's attempts to come to grips with the phallus as the signifier of the mOther's desire. As you can tell, it is not specific to Seminars I and II, in fact the discussion of alienation and separation leans heavily on S. XI and Fink skillfully ranges all across Lacan's oeuvre. It is the second best piece in the collection. As for the Imaginary section, the contributions by Koehler and Brousse are probably the most germane to the early Seminars, treating as they do the questions of psychoanalytical technique (Klein with and/or vs. Lacan, and the transference) and the dialectic of language (Symbolic) and ego (Imaginary identifications). My thoroughgoing political solidarity with the aim of Feldstein's essay "The Mirror of Manufactured Cultural Relations" is severely hampered by his atrocious writing. It's a fucking trainwreck of grandiloquent Academicker-than-thou. From the pivot point of the mirror stage he travels far and wide, taking little more than the name of Lacan with him. It is by no means a worthless writing, however: there are insightful aspects under the bombast. Here is the gist: "... such calibrated rewards and punishments encourage an aggressive "paranoid symptomatology" invested with the self-reflexive ability to read one's mind and erase from it (into the repressed recesses of unconscious oblivion) thoughts that have been censored. Unlike the ideal ego, the ego-ideal is associated less with the image in the mirror than with the censorious, self-observing voice of conscience... It is in the transition of influence from the intrapsychic ideal ego to the intersubjective ego-ideal that the paranoia of self-punishment is yielded as a result of the superimposition of the latter over the image of the former." Regarding the Real, Fink wryly tackles Lacan's notoriously opaque "Postface to 'The Purloined Letter'" and, in the end, makes it something like clearer. Miller & Co. enact a scanded encounter of "Kant w/ Sade." In between, Ellie Ragland steals the show. Her work here is simply astounding, so relentlessly dense and fascinating it made me wonder if I'd ever read Lacan at all. Not only the best in this collection, but easily among the best instances of Lacanian commentary. I'm going to truncate this review so I can read it again as soon as possible. Soler's text on "Hysteria and Obsession" is a useful delineation for clinical treatment, or general awareness for non-practitioners, emphasizing their respective comportments with regard to desire and Others. As aforementioned, Miller's "On Perversion" is a pedagogic abbreviation on the cusp of the canonical. The "Other Texts" are an array of odds and ends. By definition, they don't belong here since they are not readings of S. I & II, but there is plenty to be gleaned by newcomers and appreciated by initiates. I'm going to read Ragland (again) now and so should you.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-06 00:00:00 Ryan Hoffmann 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.