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You, Goodreader, should know I’m not a scholar; my stature does not depend on publishing a defense or rebuttal of so-and-so’s perishable rendition of this-or-that. I have no academic training, no degrees, no guidance and no constraints. I just read. Pretty soon I hope I’ll be good at it.

Forget How-To�Why read Lacan? Because you are interested, in fact it’s in your best interest. If you read with disinterest there will be no Thing to attract meaning, and knowledge will foreclose truth, vaingloriously withering into the impotent violence of reasoning without reason. It concerns you, even if you don’t believe it. If you’ve read Lacan you will hear the ventriloquist’s echo here.

Knowledge is an act caused by truth. “You� are involved, inextricable but not ineffable, not a silent or innocent bystander. Dialectical philosophy and psychoanalysis will make it more difficult for this to be ignored, eluded, forgotten, denied, repressed. Lacan provides an object (Objekt) to stimulate the source (Quelle) by which to take one’s aim (Ziel) on the highway of despair upon which we are thrust (Drang) and which must be traversed, elliptically lured by the goal of subjective destitution. That is, if you bring the drive.

“Driving� is not the least apt descriptor for Lacan’s language. It is a grudging attempt to fixate perpetual motion. Every sentence, every graph, every topology presents dynamism. The last thing Lacan wanted to do was impart a catechism by which the fearful and faithful could be mollified. His speech and writing embody the paradox of limitless hubris and self-effacing humility: the audacious rhetorical gymnastics are not those of the desiring-worm “Lacan� but rather “they don’t speak to a particular person, they just speak� a la cantonade,� to nobody in particular, to the company at large. (S XI, 16.2)

“For, as I have said, without going into the mainspring of transference, it is ultimately the analyst’s desire that operates in psychoanalysis.
The style of a philosophical conference inclines everyone, so it seems, to highlight instead his own impermeability.
I am no more unable to do so than the next person, but in the field of psychoanalytic training, the displacement process makes teaching cacophonous.�

Lacan himself tells you in countless scattered coded messages why he must gambol with language as he must. And he must. You either understand that Lacan is talking to and about you or you don’t bother. A half-assed approach exposes a complete ass, languishing and lost, looking for shortcuts on a lifelong Via Dolorosa leading back to the beginning, but this time understood as the anticipated beginning. There is no such thing as veridical comprehension, an Absolute Knowledge of “Lacanianism� as hackneyed as Lacan’s own misreading of Hegel’s master trope. Don’t take me or Zizek at our word, do it yourself: keep your face smashed for years between the Phenomenology and the Greater Logic and the Seminars and Ecrits, maybe salved with Capital and Traumdeutung, and see if the practice and technique of psychoanalytic experience do not provide the pulse and pulsion to the theory and notion of Absolute Knowledge. NEWS: Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan. Pretty encompassing.

“Now one can be a bit shaky at this junction, that is how beauty walks, but one has to shake it just right.�

Ecrits is a significant element in a rebus densely knotted with the personal, professional, philosophical, and world historical. It—and anything else aspiring to the truth of human experience—is not an ideogram, a commanding sign decipherable at a glance and just as soon out of mind. Lacan’s teaching began with an analysis of the structure of paranoiac knowledge, and his trajectory stayed the course: everything is connected. Fantasy, the phallus, desire, objet petit a, identification, drive, obsession, aggression, the paternal metaphor, RSI-RIS-SIR-SRI-IRS-ISR� nothing can be satisfyingly defined because nothing escapes the desire for definition.

“The progress of knowledge can bear…no fascination with definitions.�

You can read “The Subversion of the Subject� repeatedly (I did, do, and will) yet the cornerstone for the provisional edifice of your understanding might be secreted in a distant footnote or anecdote. A concept, function, or structure is likely to be enlisted without comment or explanation at any moment; what appears senseless, baffling, and whimsical “charlatanry� is—and only IS —meaningful (read: glistening with signifierness) in articulation with a pliant structure. Such is the psychoanalytic contribution to the secondary elaboration of the relations between particulars and universals, at once the network of language and the subject caught therein.

(Chrono-)Logically speaking, I have passed the moment for concluding a first and thorough reading, yet the time for comprehending will linger as long as I do. I must be perverse because I find that reading Lacan makes lingering and longing with life a calmer, clearer experience. His lessons still the waters I’ve struck upon dis-covering my image. Like the incorrigible narcissist we all are, I read Lacan and all I got was a lousy letter to myself. Someone—the perfect vanishing mediator between Hegel and Lacan, far better fitting than Kojeve—Lacan loves to quote, and whom like Lacan it is impossible to quote well, said it best a while before him:

“I look at myself and see myself as an angel! and I die, and I yearn�



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Yes, I read the entire Ecrits again, after reading Seminars I-XI, which took 3+ years. I'm a mortal human being of average intelligence. It is best to already know what he's talking about, second best to want to, or least worse to keep trying. The attention to detail is astonishing: I noticed only 2 typographical errors. Imagine a room filled with Marxist-Hegelian-Continental furniture; now imagine it all upside down and inside out. That is what has happened to my brain. I know (cuz I desire to know) how it stands up, what it's made of, and how it supports me. The thoroughgoing reorientation of the relations between subjectivity, truth, meaning, knowledge, desire, science, and discourse is singular and peerless. Maybe I'm a better person, maybe not, doesn't matter, I'm very glad I put myself through it all, otherwise I would have never discovered such demanding enjoyments. Not all failure is sublime but there is no sublimity without failure. Thanks, Doc, I owe you a brand new nothing. You took the words right out of my mouth and when I got them back they were just more of the same but sounded so different I could hardly speak. I wonder what voice I will find in the next 12 Seminars.