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BOOK REVIEW
Slavoj Žižek (2006). How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Books), pp. 132, ISBN 978-1-
86207-894-9
This book appeared in 2006 in a series of books from Granta on how to read
important thinkers including philosophers, theorists, and psychoanalysts. It is
therefore important to ask what the term ‘read’ really means in this series.
How does it differ from terms like ‘interpretation’? If reading Jacques Lacan is
important, then, why not get on with it instead of writing or reading a book on
Lacan? What is the difference between reading Lacan and applying Lacan to literary
and cultural texts? These then are some of the questions that will emerge in the
reader’s mind when he opens this book.
It is worth noting at the outset that the question of reading Jacques Lacan has always
been problematic because his texts are not readable in the conventional sense.
The texts of Sigmund Freud are readable not only because of the enormous lucidity
with which they were written, but also because of the extraordinary effort that Freud
put in to ensure that he was comprehensible to the educated layperson.
Lacan however felt that Freud’s attempts to communicate with the educated
layperson led to a fundamental misunderstanding in popular culture on the scope of
psychoanalysis as both a clinical technique and as a way of reading literary and
cultural texts.
That is why Lacan developed a method that is referred to as the ‘writerly’ text. This
approach to writing would not yield its meaning all that easily to readers unless they
were able and willing to make a transferential commitment to the conceptual
structure of psychoanalysis.
Lacan made his intentions clear when he stated that he did not want to make it any
easier to understand psychoanalysis than what is in fact the case. The Lacanian
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preoccupation with the ‘imaginary’ order of cognition was also something that was
crucial in Lacan’s thinking.
Lacan was haunted by the idea that attempts to popularize difficult forms of thought
or theory often generated an illusion of understanding in the reader’s mind and that
would turn out to be much more dangerous that plain ignorance. It is for these
reasons then that Lacan sought to communicate in the style of the writerly text rather
than that of the readerly text.
This series of books is an attempt to do exactly what Lacan was afraid would happen
to his text, and which he himself did his best to avoid. How then can we justify
books like this?
The only justification is that this book is written by none less the leading Lacanian
philosopher of his generation – Slavoj Žižek (who has an enviable record of beating
the odds on this matter).
Žižek has repeatedly proved through a number of books on Lacan and popular
culture that it is indeed possible to read, interpret, and apply insights from the
psychoanalytic doctrine of Jacques Lacan in a way that furthers the Lacanian project
of elaborating a theory of the subject and that such an attempt can be worthy of the
attention of even the most rigorous of didactic philosophers.
Žižek’s ability to do this consistently in book after book without any loss of analytic
rigor or without boring his readers is one of the main reasons for the fact that
Jacques Lacan has moved into the theoretical mainstream in many parts of the
world.
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Žižek is not only the most important cultural theorist in the world today, but his
studies and expositions of Lacan have made Lacanian approaches as well known as
the founding texts of Freudian psychoanalysis themselves.
Lacan’s work has not only been applied to a large number of literary and cultural
texts (of which there are a number of examples in this book), but have been used to
rethink fundamental theoretical problems in philosophy, religious studies, and
theology as well.
Žižek’s ability to make interesting connections between philosophy and
psychoanalysis has led to important reinterpretations of continental thinkers like
Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger; he is amongst the most highly cited Lacanian
philosophers in doctoral dissertations amongst contemporary thinkers in not only
Europe, but also in the Anglo-American academy.
That is why first-time readers of Žižek will find that this deceptively simple book
with easy-to-understand examples will open a new world of understanding for them
if they give it the attention that it deserves. Žižek’s books are full of examples of
Lacanian theory; so their pedagogical value cannot be underestimated.
As anybody who has taught psychoanalysis will agree, the main difficulty is in
finding examples outside the clinical realm for those who are mainly interested in
the literary or cultural applications of the analytic doctrine. There is simply nobody
else with as many examples and illustrations of how psychoanalytic concepts can
help us to make sense of everyday life.
I want to share just one of these examples from this book to give the reader a feel for
what it is like to read about psychoanalytic concepts in the idiom of Žižek.
Take for instance the traditional delineation of consciousness versus the unconscious
in theories of the mind. The former is thought to be represented on the surface of the
mind while the latter is supposed to be hidden away at great depths.
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Žižek’s point is to show that this is exactly how we must not think about the
relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.
He does this by way of a short story about a worker who is inspected by the guards
when he leaves the factory every day. The guards inspect the wheel barrow with
which he leaves to see if there is something hidden there. They do this because some
of the workers are given to stealing and hiding what they steal in the wheel barrow.
But no matter how hard the guards search the wheel barrow, they are not able to
find any stolen items.
It is only later that the guards realize that what is being stolen is not hidden inside
the wheel barrow; it is the wheel barrows themselves that are being stolen every day.
But because the stolen wheel barrows were empty, they did not understand what
was happening.
I want to share this Žižek story not only to illustrate the pedagogical implications of
using the story-telling method, but also because it illustrates Žižek’s ability to
deconstruct the surface-depth model of the unconscious that used to be the mainstay
of psychoanalytic theory.
In this story, the unconscious is not what is hidden in the wheel barrow; the
unconscious is the wheel barrow itself.
What is stolen is not hidden; it is openly on display. But because the reader expects a
stolen item to be hidden, he is not able to see what is right in front of him.
Likewise, we expect the unconscious to be present at a great depth; when it appears
on the surface, we do not notice it.
Žižek is full of stories like this; it would not be an exaggeration to say that this is a
method of theoretical exposition that even Lacan did not anticipate to work to the
extent that Žižek does though Lacan’s interpretation of the stolen letter in the Edgar
Allan Poe story is the prototype on which Žižek’s story of the wheel barrow is based.
Žižek’s impact in Lacanian studies is based then on his ability to ransack stories like
this from different parts of the world and make them pedagogically useful for those
who want to make sense of the Lacanian doctrine both to themselves and to their
students.
I do not want to steal Žižek’s thunder by sharing more than one story in this review,
but those readers who found this approach to reading Lacan useful might consider
reading this brief but captivating introduction to Lacan a worthy investment in
terms of both time and intellectual effort.
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For those who take the trouble to do this, nothing will ever be the same again.
And, finally, let us remember that this story of the wheel barrow not only
deconstructs the surface-depth model of the unconscious, it also helps us to
understand why it took the guards so long to figure out what was going on.
Insofar as the wheel barrow symbolizes the unconscious, it represents, as the
Lacanians argue, a kind of ‘over-sight.’
It is something that the guards see all the time, but nonetheless miss its significance.
That is exactly how we mis-manage our unconscious when it emerges in our
everyday life.
We see it all the time, but we do not understand its significance.
The unconscious then, as Lacan teaches us, is a kind of overseeing; it is something
that we always overlook.
Those readers who found the wheel barrow story interesting will not need a longer
book review than this; those who still do not see the point will not read Lacan no
matter how long this review might be.
I hope you belong to the category of the former and will read Žižek rather than just
what I have to say about Žižek.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN
