Derek Hook - Reading Lacans Écrits: From ‘The Freudian Thing’ to Remarks on Daniel Lagache

It all began with an improbable wager: ask 35 scholars to each write something intelligible about every single paragraph in one of the texts included in Jacques Lacans magnum opus, crits, so as to generate a commentary on the entire 800-page volume. And yet, after years of preparation, the wager has paid off: we have here useful and at times brilliant examples of textual explication! Cryptic formulations are lucidly unpacked, and mysterious references are provided, giving the serious reader myriad keys to fascinating texts.

Bruce Fink, translator of crits: The First Complete Edition in English

Lets face it: Lacans crits, one of the classical texts of modern thought, are unreadable they remain impenetrable if we just pick the thick volume up and start to read it. Neill, Vanheule and Hook provide what we were all waiting for: a detailed commentary which does not aim to replace reading crits but to render it possible. The three volumes do wonder, their effect is no less than magic: when, after getting stuck at a particularly dense page of crits, we turn to the corresponding pages in the commentary and then return to the page of crits which pushed us to madness, the same lines appear in all the clarity of their line of thought. It is thus a safe prediction that Neill, Vanheule and Hooks commentary will become a kind of permanent companion of the English translation of crits, indispensable for everyone who wants to find her or his way in its complex texture.

Slavoj iek

Lacans teaching is notoriously hard to access and comprehend. But this is done on purpose: to understanding the psyche, the subject and its interaction with socio-political reality cannot be a piecemeal operation. One needs to take into account the paradoxical and often counterintuitive effects of unconscious mechanisms, and of the extimate operation of the real within and beyond the symbolic and the imaginary. Coupling exegesis with multi-level interpretations, the numerous texts in this volume advance a commentary, both informative and suggestive, that will immensely help readers navigate the archipelago of the Lacanian crits, without reducing in the least their complexity and inspirational value, without sacrificing their ability to surprise, provoke and jolt us out of our complacency.

Yannis Stavrakakis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

These essays will be an invaluable resource not only for those approaching the crits for the first time but also for seasoned readers. Broad in scope yet following the detail of the text, they help guide us through Lacans difficult prose, elucidating, contextualising and clarifying, and reminding us time and time again of the precision, power and originality of his rethinking of psychoanalysis.

Darian Leader

The crits was Jacques Lacans single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacans crits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacans crits to be published in English.

An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century, Lacans crits still today begs the interpretative engagement of clinicians, scholars, philosophers and cultural theorists. The three volumes of Reading Lacans crits offer just this: a series of systematic paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries by some of the worlds most renowned Lacanian analysts and scholars on the complete edition of the crits, inclusive of lesser-known articles such as Kant with Sade, The Youth of Gide, Science and Truth, Presentation on Transference and Beyond the Reality Principle.

The originality and importance of Lacans crits to psychoanalysis and intellectual history is matched only by the texts notorious inaccessibility. Reading Lacans crits is an indispensable companion piece and reference-text for clinicians and scholars exploring Lacans magnum opus. Not only does it contextualize, explain and interrogate Lacans arguments, it provides multiple interpretative routes through this most labyrinthine of texts.

Reading Lacans crits provides an incisive and accessible companion for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers who wish to draw upon Lacans pivotal work.

Derek Hook is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and a Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria. A former lecturer at the London School of Economics and at Birkbeck College, he is a psychoanalytic practitioner, and the author of Six Moments in Lacan.

Calum Neill is an Associate Professor of Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory at Edinburgh Napier University. He is the author of Without Ground: Lacanian Ethics and the Assumption of Subjectivity, Ethics and Psychology: Beyond Codes of Practice and Jacques Lacan: The Basics.

Stijn Vanheule is a Clinical Psychologist and a Professor of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium. He is also a privately practicing psychoanalyst and a member of the New Lacanian School for Psychoanalysis. He is the author of The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective and Psychiatric Diagnosis Revisited From DSM to Clinical Case Formulation.

Edited by Derek Hook, Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule

First published 2020

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hook, Derek, editor. | Neill, Calum, 1968 editor. | Vanheule, Stijn, 1974 editor.

Title: Reading Lacans crits : from The Freudian thing to Remarks on Daniel Lagache / edited by Derek Hook, Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule.