Madan Sarup (1930–1993)

Madan Sarup's Jacques Lacan is one of many introductory guides to this difficult thinker, and in my opinion, it is one of the better ones.

The introduction recounts the early resistance to psychoanalysis in France, showing just how remarkable it is that Lacan was able to bring it to such a position of pre-eminence during the 1960s.

Sarup then launches into an overview of Lacan's main influence: Freud (Ch.1), the surrealists (Ch.2), philosophers like Spinoza, Hegel, Sartre, and Heidegger (Ch.3), and the linguistic theories of Saussure and Jacobson (Ch.4).

Chapter 5 is a very useful overview of the historical development of some of Lacan's major concepts, followed by a review of some of the major essays that appear in Écrits (Ch.6). Sarup then summarizes the three Lacanian registers of the real, imaginary, and symbolic (Ch.7).

The book closes with an overview of Lacan's influence in the fields of feminism (Ch.8), film studies (Ch.9), and literature (Ch.10).

Sarup's book is economical and easy to read, but for all its brevity it does do a pretty good job of introducing the reader to Lacan's work. What I particularly like about it is the way Sarup manages to convey a historical sense of development to Lacan's ideas, a quality that compares favorably to other writers who treat his theories as a fully-formed "system."… (meer)