lacan's seminar VII

[alucidwake]

this book seems to be pretty notorious..

i've just started reading psychoanalysis - i read zizek's "sublime object of ideology" right before i read hays's "architecture's desire" - kind of a crash course in lacan (the second title reads postmodern architecture through the lens of psychoanalysis to explain its motive, "desire")

i'm wondering if anyone has read the seminar and, my question is, how accessible is it? like i said i'm not EXTREMELY familiar with lacan or freud or psychoanalysis in general, but who has been recently reading it in its application to other theoretical fields (which helps me understand it greatly).

thanks for the feedback!

[johann cruyff]

Seminar VII is titled The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and from my experience, it would probably be one of the most difficult starting points for studying Lacan.

I suggest you try to pick something else up, possibly some of the Ecrits - there exists a complete translation in English now (I believe it was done by Bruce Fink, IIRC). The first I read was the Seminar on the Purloined Letter - not that it's easy, but definitely interesting and considerably less demanding than most of his other writings.

I also suggest you pick up Žižek's ''How to Read Lacan'', but don't expect it to help you greatly - you might pick up a few useful analogies for further studying Lacan, though.

There are books like ''A Compendium of Lacanian Terms'', and these are, in my opinion, most useful, because they offer a summary of all the key points in one place - it's quite difficult grasping all of these if you're only reading the man himself, because he often refers to previous seminars and ideas without explaining, or sometimes, even naming them, so either you'd need to read everything in chronological order (impossible unless you read French) or you're lost.

Also, one of the standard starting points is his idea of the mirror stage, try to pick that up. People often get seduced by his seminar ''The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis'', thinking it would be something like an introduction, only to find themselves inside one of the most difficult of Lacan's books. Don't make that mistake. Also, did you know that he didn't in fact write these books? They are all just transcripts of his speeches, which, given the fact that he was a gesticulation maniac, sometimes renders the text impossible to read and understand in quite the way that it was intended.

Try to learn a little something about structuralism, de Saussure, Levi-Strauss, semiotics, phenomenology, Freud...

Hope that was a little helpful. If you have any more questions regarding Lacan, also feel free to PM me, I'll try to give you some more pointers if I can.

[blp]

Lacan is absurdly hard and, from what I can gather, has been made harder for English language readers by frequently being poorly translated.

Lionel Bailly's book, simply titled 'Lacan' provides a much simpler and more straightforward introduction than any other primer I've yet found. A lot of Žižek's serious philosophical works, including the one you've read, also provide insight, more so, in fact, than 'How to Read Lacan'.

[sharpie]

I would also recommend Lorenzo Chiesa's Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan. This is by far one of the best Lacan introductions I have read because it delineates the theoretical evolution of Lacan's open system, which is essential to understanding the man. Lacan's severely dense texts are carefully explained by Chiesa in a way which is a bit more substantial than Fink's more surface-level analyses or Zizek's incessant rambling.