Why Read Lacan?
“Thinking is not an illness in itself, but it can make some people ill.”
Lacan, My Teaching
Lacan viewed himself as a clinical psychoanalytic practitioner, however his impact and influence went far beyond the psychoanalytic community:
- He is viewed as one of the three primary “Post-Structuralist” philosophers
- His approach implies a sort of metaphysics, epistemology & ethics—the three traditional elements of philosophy
- It is important to grasp these ideas if one is to better understand the work of Laclau, Zizek and Judith Butler.
Therefore our reading and discussion we will try to focus on Lacan from a philosophical perspective and only look into clinical practice if it enlightens our philosophical understanding.
Lacan’s purpose was not to write a book to explain his ideas, and what he did write was not for a general audience but rather was directed at psychoanalytic specialists in the contexts of his seminars. If fact he himself describes Écrits as “no more than a few threads, floats, islands or markers that I put down from time to time for the people I’m teaching.”
“In the course of those long years of teaching, from time to time I composed an écrit and it seemed to me important to put it there like a pylon to mark a stage, the point we had reached in some year, some period in some year. … I was speaking for the benefit of people it concerned directly, for the specific people who call themselves psychoanalysts. It had to do with their most direct, most day-to-day, and most urgent experience. It was done expressly for them, and it’s never been done for anyone else.”
To create these “markers,” Lacan uses numerological mathemes in a pseudo-geometry of his own invention. These curious glyphs seem to symbolize rigor and clarity without actually providing it. It is the same with his prose, which borders on the richness of poetry.
Many of the words he uses have very specific and technical meanings. A good example is the term translated as “Name-of-the-Father.” This is one (of many!) untranslatable puns used obsessively by Lacan. In French, it is “le nom du père” literally “name of the Father” which describes the function of the Father in the Symbolic realm (another very complex and idiosyncratic idea from Lacan that means something very specific and technical and nothing like what you assume reading the words). The French pronunciation of “le nom du père” is homophonous with two other phrases that underlie and inform the first: “le non du père” means “the prohibition by the father,” which is very similar to Freud’s Über-ich, and the very interesting and very confusing phrase “les non-dupes err” which means something like “the mistakes made by those that are not fooled” a phrase so rich with meaning it could easily take several pages to unpack.
This makes for very challenging reading, particularly if one is not prepared to do a lot of homework. Most importantly one must attempt understand what this technical vocabulary is supposed to mean for Lacan, rather than assuming you can guess at the meaning based on the common usage of the translated English words, which only leads to chaos and confusion.
To help us see through the chaos we will be reading Bailly’s Lacan: A Beginners Guide ($6-15) 248 pages. Available at Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y4sgzqmj
This short and inexpensive volume is very good at explaining all the key philosophical concepts. It is generally easy to follow, but not dumbed down, and still provides some challenging reading as many of the ideas are counterintuitive. But the effort pays off and should leave a reader better prepared to dive into reading Écrits or any of Lacan’s followers like Laclau, Zizek or Judith Butler.
Several, Four, Many 