Bruce Fink (1)

An astoundingly clear cut elucidation of Lacanian psychoanalysis; as for the content itself I’m still uncertain of its usefulness. The same kind of reticence comes up whenever I hear Marxists try to construe their own discourse as a science, since one can always attempt to portray it as some kind of fully furnished organon. It’s the same with psychoanalysis, certainly thrilling to read through, but one is seriously sceptical of its extension into other fields (outside of being the worst kind of cultural/literary critic - thumbing in flaccid theory so as to reductively analyse some Lynch film). Maybe Fink will prove this intuition wrong in his Clinical Introduction, because I have been lead to believe that psychoanalysis has just about the same efficacy/success rate as CBT (even if Fink, regurgitating Lacan, sees discussions of efficacy, correcting character traits etc. as merely improving some arbitrary good instead of doing what is important, namely, dialectising the master signifier and traversing over fantasy).

I suppose that any seemingly coherent theorem (even with Lacan’s stipulations that his system not be seen as a closed economy, that there remains something ineffable at the base, the ineluctable nature of object (a), aptly referred to as Gödelian structuralism) provides a placebo, the subject-as-presumed-to-know will reign in all therapeutic fields as long as we are cowardly enough to continue to cry out for therapy.

So why choose Lacanian psychoanalysis? It seems to be the most bookish of the analytic tradition — maybe it can be seen as the best avenue toward a who’s got the biggest dick style competition between analyst and analysand to see who is more well read and intelligent (of course the analyst isn’t meant to give into this, is instead likely to cough or seem disinterested - but come on, the guy’s still human). Also.... how is one to believe in therapy, or more specifically its value? I struggle to see how all the elusiveness in the world incarnated by the analyst as analyst-becoming-the-elusive-position-of-desire could breach the dam of the analysand’s stubbornness on this one point.

I’m rambling now. Good book.… (más)

It is hard to rate Reading Seminar XX, which includes some of the same old names that keep turning up in every essay collection from this period. Nonetheless, this book did manage to surprise me - the first three chapters, in particular, are worth the price of admission.

The first of these three outstanding chapters is by Bruce Fink, whose work I normally dislike due to its blandness. However, Fink does an excellent in delineating the split between knowledge and desire in Lacan's theory of subjectivity, and how this evolves from the early period up to Seminar XX. Definitely the best piece by Fink that I have come across.

The second is an essay on hysteria by Colette Soler, whose work I like even less. Soler's chapter is not genuinely groundbreaking, but I thought its discussion of the hysteric and the way it produces knowledge/mastery was really well done.

The third and final essay is by Slavoj Žižek, who articulates the implications of the theory of the "not-all" that appears in Seminar XX. This piece is particularly important for how it anticipates the relationship between Judaism and Christianity that will be explored in [b:The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology|18916|The Neighbor Three Inquiries in Political Theology|Slavoj Žižek|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328872581s/18916.jpg|20261].

The rest of the essays in this book, unfortunately, are blandly academic and not of great interest, but these three opening chapters provide some great critical insights into Seminar XX.… (más)