Travel guide to Lacan’s country

Abstract

A great reader and critic of the culture of his time and one of the most prominent names in contemporary psychoanalysis, Slavoj Žižek dispels the fable according to which reading Lacan is hard and difficult work that would only be the privilege of psychoanalysis specialists and, your reader with an engaging tour of the Lacan country. Slavoj Žižek is the author of a number of books, including the provocative essays "Hegel, the most sublime of the hysterics" and "They do not know what they say" - the majority published in around thirty languages. He is acknowledged to be a profound connoisseur of Hegel and Karl Marx; passionate reader of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan; a striking critic of totalitarian ideologies, a spirit cultivated by his affiliation with the multiple arts - including a specialist in Alfred Hitchcock's cinematography. The traces of his erudition and sensitivity to the arts are reflected and his writing style is particularly well represented in the manner in which this new book was created. "How to read Lacan" teaches us to adopt a special method to guide in such a venture. Žižek advocates that in order to read Lacan we should apply the same method employed by psychoanalysis to read and interpret the text that results from unconscious work. But there is a condition for this use: to abandon the vice of wanting to understand, for, like the unconscious, Lacan should not be understood and read, for, as he himself had already warned us, the worst destiny to which we can be led is destiny that leads us to understanding. Only in this way will it be easy to read Lacan, more than is often imagined. Many introductions to his teaching were published, some of them marked by conceptual rigor, others resulted in crude versions of his writing. Without detracting from the existing good introductions to Lacan, the version of Žižek, in addition to its original stylistic and creative edification, is distinguished from the others by proposing that the reader may read Lacan by asserting the very method he used when reading it. Freudian work, in which he proposes the return to the truth of his letter: the unconscious thinks and speaks. In him lies not a deep truth but an unbearable truth and with which each subject should learn to live. One of the arguments of the book is that in his return to Freud, Lacan, he sought to be accompanied by other non-members of the psychoanalytic field, among them Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Jakobson, Edgar Allan Poe, Cantor, Plato, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Karl Marx. The same is proposed by the author to his reader, taking him through the reading with Lacan of authors and artistic works, as well as events of our culture, to illuminate concepts previously considered as obscure. Each chapter of the book was constructed in the sense of confronting a Lacanian concept with a fragment from literature, cinema, media productions, politics, among others, showing that psychoanalytic concepts, as well as their clinical dimension, are disseminated in the various domains of what our life is made of. Thus, for example, the concepts of "ideal of the self" and "superego" are transmitted as Lacan becomes a spectator of the movie "Casablanca". The concept of real, in turn, emerges from Lacan's position as an Alien viewer. Zizek also makes Lacan watch even a Mexican soap opera to mention his theses. It is exemplary the passage in which it seeks to inform the reader of the Lacanian theses about the dissymmetry that exists, due to the subjective incidence of sexual difference, in the amorous encounter between man and woman. It refers to an advertising piece of beer - aired on British TV - where a beautiful girl walks along the bank of a river and faces a frog, to which she kisses him affectionately, transforming him, by this act, in a prince. The latter, in turn, cast an eager glance of desire at the girl, pulling her to him and kissing her with ardor, thereby turning her into an appetizing beer can. Nothing more coherent with the quantum formulas of Lacan's sexuation which shows the impossible complementation between man and woman, since she expects of man his phallic substance, while he expects the woman to be the cause of his desire. A final example of the many present in the book: The letter addressed to Max Brod by Milena Jesenska in which he speaks of Kafka serves the purpose of elucidating Lacan's thesis that the true formula of materialism is not that " God does not exist, "but that" God is dead. " "How to read Lacan" testifies to the vitality of psychoanalysis, despite the imperative of the illusions so fashionable in our culture, marked by the ideals of happiness; of eternal youth; of perfect health, of well-being, of success; of the adaptation and affirmation of the power of synthesis and self-control of the self. Alice loved it and remembered the lesson she had when she stepped through the mirror: know how to make the horrible a marvel. Unheimlich