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How to Read Lacan (How to Read)

Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Granta Books
Category: Book

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Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars

3 reviews
Sales Rank: 9387

Media: Paperback
Pages: 128
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5.1 x 0.5

ISBN: 1862078947
EAN: 9781862078949
ASIN: 1862078947

Publication Date: September 4, 2006
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Also Available In:

•	Paperback - How to Read Lacan (How to Read)

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Customer Reviews:

2 out of 5 stars

A very good introduction to...Zizek June 20, 2008
This book is short, readable, interesting, truthful to Lacan, funny etc.

But if you want a serious introduction to Lacan which will lead you to understand sentences like "the subject is what a signifier represent for another signifier" or "desire is the desire of the Other" and other kind of Lacanian slogans, you have to know that THERE IS NO EASY WAY INTO LACAN.

I'm saying that because I started with Zizek's Looking Awry which is supposedly an introduction to Lacan as well, then I tried this one but, although you can get what Zizek is getting at, Lacan's thought remains in the background.

Although those books might give an exemple of what can be done with Lacanian theory, I really advice anyone to start with Bruce Fink's Clinical Introduction, and then to get to his Lacanian Subject. I really made a breakthrough in my understanding of Lacan with those two books (which are clear but demanding and rewarding). Another book you might want to consider is Reading Seminars I & II - an excellent collection of essays.

Zizek is perhaps one of the most witty thinkers at the moment, but you will get more out of him once you know more about Lacan, Hegel, Marx and Kant. When you have a good grasp of those thinkers, you'll see Zizek under a totally different light.

I also advice you to read Lacan's Seminar VII which is not really complicated if you have already some knowledge and that you take the time to read. Indeed, this seminar is the one from which Zizek seems to draw most of his material (about Sade, the sublime, the Real and the second death)

5 out of 5 stars

Irrefutable! June 7, 2008
3 out of 5 found this review helpful

Here one might claim the ground that Zizek has fundamentally misunderstood a key point in this laconic and iconic text(ure)that is the reading of Lacan. There is moreover some lassitude here which Zizek signally and fortuitously fails to address, and in effect does-not-witness. Moreover, nothing less than the past-present actuality of future hermeneutics is at stake: nothing less than the entirety of the totalising moment so ably witnessed by the gyratory explorations of a Desire which cannot but reprimand the fortuitous enterprises of the sugared and unconsciously grasped moment - a bejewelled favour of Zizek's own mimesis which illuminates his astute dissections of, for example, the un/canny tryst between "Hegel's apprentice" and late Robbie Williams - not to mention Zizeks's (largely unpublished) acerbic conversations with Elton John (ably reviewed by Scott Demalmaison: "The Windsor addenda, and its sequel(s), Annals of Contemporary Misgiving, vol 32, Spring 2003, pp507-729). And then, finally, there is the (remains/remainders) of Zizek's dynamic and overwhelmingly brilliant overhaul around the representations of misplaced classicism through Hitchock's insertion of castor oil surrogates for a particularly (un)redeemed (misogynist? imagistic?) passage in Marnie.

And yet, with all that said and agreed, one is obliged to return to that crucial disjuncture that threatens to rupture the temporality discourse initiated by Marx and most recently revived in the furious exchanges between Piet Vassilov and John Brown in the letters page of the Hermenutics Digest, vol 237, Fall 2005.

Moreover, after all, and given all that, it seems that in the end Zizeg cannot quite transcend this key and possibly irrefutable paragraph in Lacan: "la tranquilite epistemologique des philosophes du Sorbonne n'est jamais beaucoup plus ou moins qu'une reponse incandescente a la torsion metaphorique bosseles dans l'amour de la modernite par la faussete de ses representations succulentes. Elle est en effet tordue. Et c'est le doute qui creuse la perception meme de la perception et reside dans une exegese fondamentale qui saute simplement au-dessus de toutes les objections a la nature sporadique de la calamite du temoin doux - conformement a nos temps.

Quite so ! And Zizek should know that.

5 out of 5 stars

see the real... March 10, 2007
11 out of 12 found this review helpful

Very useful introduction to Lacan as well as Zizek himself.
I have read the Bowie book (Fontana Masters)which is more comprhensive but I found I have learned more from this book.
Zizek covers Lacan's 'Triad' concepts of the Symbolic, Imaginary and the Real, with a colourful and highly intelligent prose, but never straying from the objective.