On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: Encore 1972-1973

A wonderful translation (with great notes), of an incredible text. Lacan is a very "dense" writer - in the sense both of difficult and rich. I am not even going to try to sum up all of the ideas and insights that this book will force YOU to produce. (For a useful introduction to Lacan see the books written by Bruce Fink - the translator).

If you are familiar with Lacan, you probably know what you're in for...if not, read on for my own brief understanding in 50 words or less. First of all -- Lacan is well-worth the effort. He is difficult, whooly, interesting, funny, serious, witty. "There's such a thing as One" It is there that the serious begins. For Lacan as for Freud, the child is born into desire. But for Lacan this desire is more than sexual (though also sexual) Desire comes out of the imbalance between what we perceive, language and images, and what actually is the Real. It is impossible to satisfy this desire, because we cannot know what we want. The real is utterly unknowable. Longing is displaced -- we long for everything else instead: sex, food, drugs, alcohol, consumer objects--trying to fill the void of desire. But we are not satisfied by any of these things, because as soon as the desire is fulfilled it vanishes.Some of Lacan's concepts (as the one above) I read and say -- yes that's IT ... as Lacan said in the lecture translated in this book-- "It's not working out and the whole world talks about it and a large part of our activity is taken up with saying so." Many of the concepts in this book were worth the wading through it -- which I did in one night, entranced, reading through as if in a maze -- or in one of Lacan's Borromean Knots (in which the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real are linked like the rings of a Borromean knot)

The introduction articles for this book are worth the price of the book; they are clear, intelligent, and balanced. Other contributing writers vary from clear and didactic to veritable models of French obscuritanism, but for the reader interested in Lacanian theory and the debate about feminine sexuality, this book is well worth reading. Some of the points made in the introduction are key.

I liked this book because of it's sequential and systematical analysis of human behaviour.

Ah, Lacan...While the postmodern generation, driven to digital scriptololia and hiding beneath their cyber-covers dreaming of Hale-Bopp, continues to feed the yet burgeoning X-philes kitsch and cannabis industry, Lacan stands ready, armed with a bastion of certitude decked out in quagmire of tangled, crabbed, needling, Gallic, galling prose: beneath it all, the phallus, the objet a, the name-of-the-father, the Other of the Other, and jouissance, it all goes back to mom. Oh, the laughter--that none may deny--EVERYBODY's parents @* & #-ed them up