Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan (Suny Series in Psychoanalysis & Culture) (Suny Series, Psychoanalysis & Culture)

In this first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work, Nasio eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments.

Five Lessons on the Psychoanalytic Theory of Jacques Lacan is the first English translation of a classic text by one of the foremost commentators on Lacan's work. Juan-David Nasio makes numerous theoretical advances and eloquently demonstrates the clinical and practical import of Lacan's theory, even in its most difficult or obscure moments. What is distinctive, in the end, about Nasio's treatment of Lacan's theory is the extent to which Lacan's fundamental concepts--the unconscious, jouissance, and the body--become the locus of the overturning or exceeding of the discrete boundaries of the individual. The recognition of the implications of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory, then, brings the analyst to adopt what Nasio calls a "special listening."

"Nasio's Five Lessons provides an incisive entry into the densities of Lacan's difficult discourse. Focusing on the two principles of the unconscious as 'structured like a language' and of jouissance as signifying that 'there is no sexual relation,' Nasio takes up Lacanian theory in a refreshingly nondogmatic way. The complex role of the signifier, the vexing status of the subject of the unconscious, and the enigmatic object a are illuminated in the context of fantasy and the body. This is a remarkable work, as pithy as it is profound. The translation by Pettigrew and Raffoul makes Nasio's text--and thus Lacan's Ecrits--lucidly accessible." -- Edward S. Casey, State University of New York at Stony Brook