Lacan revisited by Žižek - DOI: 10.4025/actascilangcult.v31i1.4742

Résumé

Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote this book for the W.W. Norton & Company series How to Read. However, the book is not only an introduction to some ideas and concepts of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) but an appropriate introduction to Žižek’s own thinking. The fact is that Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan’s student and afterwards son-in-law, was the one who devoted his entire life to the publishing of Lacan’s Seminars. Actually most of his scripts needs careful reading and a lot of interpretation, since Lacan himself never cared much for structuring his prose didactically, defining concepts and keeping the definitions rigorously throughout the books. Lacanian commentators such as Bruce Fink are most careful when discussing his ideas, because Lacan’s thinking might be described as brilliant, albeit mercurial. He uses very complex concepts and abandons them after a few years (like the Freud-inspired Das Ding, The Thing); or apparently changes some of the concept’s original features.