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Summary: Fit for purpose
Comment: To put it down in the simplest of forms, this book provides what's written on the tin.
It serves to introduce readers (including a layman such as myself) to the dense thought of Lacan, but it's not a mere overview of that - for it would be quite incomplete if it was.
Instead what the book does offer is interpretation and many clear -but never shallow- applications to a wide range of fields of experience and intellectual production: from the "unknown unknowns" in the Iraq's war to Shakespeare's Richard II monologues.
Lacan's concepts are not easy to grasp and this book isn't either, but the pickings are worth it.
Particularly as you'll get an introduction as well to an eclectic thinker, which is Zizek (the "big Other" here, and not a much concealed one!).
Customer Rating:
Summary: A very good introduction to...Zizek
Comment: 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)
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Summary: Irrefutable!
Comment: 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 tranquilité épistémologique des philosophes du Sorbonne n'est jamais beaucoup plus ou moins qu'une réponse incandescente à la torsion métaphorique bosselés dans l'amour de la modernité par la fausseté de ses représentations succulentes. Elle est en effet tordue. Et c'est le doute qui creuse la perception même de la perception et réside dans une exégèse fondamentale qui saute simplement au-dessus de toutes les objections à la nature sporadique de la calamité du témoin doux - conformément à nos temps.»
Quite so ! And Zizek should know that.
Customer Rating:
Summary: see the real...
Comment: 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.
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