Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely

by Bruce Fink

To read Lacan closely is to follow him to the letter, to take him literally, making the wager that he comes right out and says what he means in many cases, though much of his argument must be reconstructed through a line-by-line examination. And this is precisely what Bruce Fink does in this ambitious book, a fine analysis of Lacan's work on language and psychoanalytic treatment conducted on the basis of a very close reading of texts in his Icrits: A Selection. As a translator and renowned proponent of Lacan's works, Fink is an especially adept and congenial guide through the complexities of Lacanian literature and concepts. He devotes considerable space to notions that have been particularly prone to misunderstanding, notions such as "the sliding of the signified under the signifier,"or that have gone seemingly unnoticed, such as "the ego is the metonymy of desire." Fink also pays special attention to psychoanalytic concepts, like affect, that Lacan is sometimes thought to neglect, and to controversial concepts, like the phallus. From a parsing of Lacan's claim that "commenting on a text is like doing an analysis," to sustained readings of "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious," "The Direction of the Treatment," and "Subversion of the Subject" (with particular attention given to the workings of the Graph of Desire), Fink's book is a work of unmatched subtlety, depth, and detail, providing a valuable new perspective on one of the twentieth century's most important thinkers. Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst, analytic supervisor, and professor of psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He is the author of A Clinical Introduction to LacanianPsychoanalysis (1997) and The Lacanian Subject (1995). He has coedited three volumes on Lacan's seminars and is the translator of Lacan's Seminar XX, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (1998), Icrits: A Selection (2002), and Icrits: The Complete Text (forthcoming).

Genres: Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Philosophy, Theory, Nonfiction, France, 21st Century

208 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2004

About the author

Bruce Fink is a practicing Lacanian psychoanalyst and analytic supervisor. He trained as a psychoanalyst in France for seven years with and is now a member of the psychoanalytic institute Jacques Lacan created shortly before his death, the École de la Cause freudienne in Paris, and obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII (Saint-Denis). He served as Professor of Psychology from 1993 to 2013 at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and is currently an affiliated member of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.

Dr. Fink is the author of six books on Lacan (which have been translated into many different languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, German, Polish, Croatian, Greek, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese):
• The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)
• A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997)
• Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004)
• Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique: A Lacanian Approach for Practitioners (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2007)
• Against Understanding: Commentary, Cases, and Critique in a Lacanian Key, 2 volumes (London: Routledge, 2013-2014)

He has translated several of Lacan’s works, including:
• The Seminar, Book XX (1972-1973): Encore, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998)
• Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 2002)
• Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York: Norton, 2006), for which he received the 2007 nonfiction translation prize from the French-American Foundation and the Florence Gould Foundation
• On the Names-of-the-Father (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013)
• The Triumph of Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013)
• The Seminar, Book VIII: Transference (Cambridge: Polity Press, forthcoming)

He is also the coeditor of three collections on Lacan’s work published by SUNY Press:
• Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1995)
• Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud (1996)
• Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (2002)

He has presented his theoretical and clinical work at close to a hundred different conferences, psychoanalytic institutes, and universities in the U.S. and abroad since 1986.

In recent years, he has authored mysteries involving a character based on Jacques Lacan: The Adventures of Inspector Canal (London: Karnac, 2010, and translated into Finnish). A second volume, Death by Analysis, was published by Karnac in 2013, to be followed by two further mysteries in 2014 (The Purloined Love and Odor di Murderer).

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterful. A sterling guide no titular Lacanian should omit. Fink won't lay out the coordinates to smoothly sail you through the maelstrom, but he'll show you plenty of ways to swim. Just get in the goddamn water already.
- - - - -
Runner-up thoughts:
The final section on S.XX seems like a last minute add-on. Not that it doesn't knot with the foregoing skein, I get that Encore can patch the worn elbows of Ecrits, but why send it down the runway here? Perhaps because the epochal "Function & Field" had been around long enough to be covered from every angle and the rest of Ecrits was still an alien glyph of impregnability. The leap from Ecrits to S.XX skips a world of terrain and even with Fink's firm grasp the landing leaves something amiss. I, slow wayfarer, am probably just lamenting the lost scenery.

[Micah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely helpful and far-ranging.

[Neal Spadafora · Rating 5 out of 5]

*This is my generic post for Fink's works.*

I seldomly recommend reading secondary literature on a thinker prior to or during a reading of the primary literature. Fink is the exception. More than that, Fink may be the best thing that ever happened to Lacan in the English world. Fink's style is the opposite of Lacan's; that is, Fink writes so that you can understand what he is saying. Lacan's style has *rightly* alienated people from reading him, which is a shame, as he does have truly brilliant insights into the nature of language and its impact on how we think about ourselves and history (on this point, see my other reviews on Lacan's work).

Most of Fink's writing on Lacan is a commentary on a specific text. You could do worse than read Lacan and Fink in tandem, especially if you're not just reading the Seminars in order. However, if you're looking for an introduction to Lacan, then you should start with "The Lacanian Subject." If you're reading Écrits, then you should read "Lacan to the Letter" alongside it. If you're reading a single Lacan seminar, odds are that Fink has an essay, article, or book on that seminar and if you're confused (you will be), then should consult Fink's work. Once you've read enough Lacan and have read enough Fink, you'll find that the irritating games Lacan plays are now miraculously (almost) legible.

Fink's entire career is dedicated to the sole task of demonstrating how and why Lacan helps us better understand the construction of human subjectivity and how language indelible informs that construction. He has successfully completed this task. May we all tip our hats to the man.

[Kira · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best 'secondary literature' on Lacan that I've seen. I don't see how the book could be substantially improved, given the difficulty of Lacan's ideas and texts. Fink's reading of "Subversion of The Subject" is brilliant. Once you read this, at least you can go back to Ecrits and see if you find his reading confirmed by the text. If not, you're in a much better position to correct it towards your own reading..

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

A charlatan protecting his investment. Or how beautiful the emperror's clothes are!

[Quilty · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book hasn't quite made Lacan's concepts understandable for someone who hasn't read him at all. I revisited this book upon reading some Lacan and in a delightfully retroactive manner, I realized that I couldn't have summed up some of Lacan's points any better. I suppose the biggest confusion arises from Lacan's concept of the Other, which runs counter to Foucault's, concept, and incidentally, the one that I was exposed to earlier, of the same name. Fink's writing is playful and refreshingly colloquial that will leave people who read his translation of Lacan's own enigmatic texts baffled. Or at least he left this one reader baffled, since one can see the painstaking lengths Fink had to traverse to remain faithful to the French.
Although this book provides a clear account of Lacan's abstruse and often poetic essays and lectures, his stubborn unwillingness to sacrifice the complexity behind the details of the ways in which Lacan articulates his ideas (e.g. the graph of desire, L-schema) rendered the book somewhat unreadable without getting the general feel for what Lacan's like by going to Lacan's text itself. I'm sure there are many points I missed in this that I will revisit upon reading more Lacan.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The cause—which Lacan says is sutured by science — is where jouissance is situated. It is not the subject who is said to be sutured in that article, for science is said to deal with the same subject we deal within psychoanalysis; instead, science is said to suture the cause, dealing only with the"nonsaturated" subject, not with what we might call the "saturated" subject—the latter being the one who is saturated by her cause, that is, the subject we deal within psychoanalysis. The terms Lacan uses to qualify what is sutured by science in"Subversion of the Subject" are "subjectivity" and"truth"; in 1965, the terms he uses are"jouissance" and "the cause."In both cases, it is the upper level of the Graph of Desire that depicts what is sutured by science or what is beyond science: the cause, affect, libido, jouissance.

[Chelsea Szendi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some people who would know better than I that Fink misinterprets (and mistranslates) some key points of Lacan. I, the subject not supposing to know, would simply run from "Ecrits" in fear without Fink to soothe me.

[Jake]

Lacan's writings are notoriously (and deliberatly) difficult to grasp. Bruce Fink as accomplished quite a feat in that he has rendered Lacan accessable, but without fostering the illusion of a definitive summation of his work.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

How to read Lacan literally. Great introductory book if you're looking to delve into Lacan's Ecrits.

[Savaş · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good interpretation of 10 of Lacan's selected works from Ecrits.

[Luke Echo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been quite invaluable in providing an entry point into Ecrits.

[Ciprian Ghibirdic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I omitted reading the notes on this one. Will come back to it eventually when the time to delve into Écrits comes (for me).