Ellie Ragland-Sullivan

Ellie Ragland (she dropped the -Sullivan from her name with this book, apparently) is one of those exemplary, orthodox Lacanians that I just can't stand. Her earlier book, [b:Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis|2284557|Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis|Ellie Ragland-Sullivan|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328871666s/2284557.jpg|2290762] was an extremely competent but sternly rigid interpretation of Lacan in the light of his philosophical influences.

This book's title is a little more puzzling - Essays on the Pleasures of Death?! Certainly the third chapter focuses on this question, but the rest of the book coheres more closely around the book's subtitle, "From Freud to Lacan."

As such, after opening with a meditation on translation (French to English, Freud to Lacan), Ragland essentially plays here a selection of the Lacanian greatest hits, showing how Lacan draws from and modifies Freud's theories in order to translate them into his own setof ideas.

As such, the book has no real sense of flow, direction, or argument, it merely outlines how Lacan reworks Freud's theories of the ego and narcissism (Ch.1), his theory of psychoses (Ch.2), the death drive and its relation to jouissance (Ch.3), the notion of the cure (Ch.4), the ethics of desire (Ch.7), and the paternal metaphor (Ch.8). If you've read Freud and Lacan, there will be that is new in here.

The best parts of the book occur in Ragland's analysis of the death drive in Chapter 3 and the notion of ethics in Chapter 7, where she does at least show in a somewhat interesting way how Lacan's work is revolutionary in its rereading of Freud. Otherwise, though, the book is dry, technical, and academic - not to mention the fact that it is obviously intended more for an audience of analysts than theorists.

Essays on the Pleasure of Death is not a bad book as such, it's just that it lacks a certain level of innovation and new insight that is on display in both Ragland's contemporaries (Jane Gallop or David Macey, for instance) or the New Lacanians (like Joan Copjec or Slavoj Žižek). There is little in this book that I couldn't have found by going back and rereading Lacan's seminars and Écrits. I also object to Ragland's sycophantic adoration of Jacques-Alain Miller, whose interpretations of Lacan's work I find almost propagandist in their mythologization of the "Master." Thankfully this mode of Lacanian thought is rapidly disappearing into the mire of history.… (meer)

Lacan and the Subject of Language boasts a star-studded line-up of writers on Lacan, from Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan's son-in-law and legal heir) to Russell Grigg (one of the best translators of Lacan into English) to Slavoj Žižek (whose star has since risen to make him one of the leading theorists writing today).

The collection came out at a time when the star of high theory had not yet begun to wane, when books like this were a dime a dozen - I know, because I have recently been reading my way through a bunch of them. The quality of the essays collected here is reasonably even in quality (not surprising, given the star power of the contributors), but there is nothing, at the same time, that stands out as particularly innovative and surprising.

In part, I would attribute that shortcoming to the book's choice of topic, which to me tends to limit the discussion to the structuralist-linguistic aspects of the early-to-middle periods of Lacan's work. Indeed, Žižek does his best to toe the line, at first, and then only later breaks with these language-bound constraints by appealing to the notion of symptom/sinthome that emerges in the later work of Lacan. I would love to have seen more such inventiveness in this collection, but the other pieces were largely academic and very, very serious.… (meer)

As its title suggests, Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis attempts to locate Lacan's work in relation to the discourse of philosophy. Such a task might seem an obvious one - after all, Lacan talks about a range of different philosophies in his seminars and writings - yet he always insisted that he was not a philosopher, but a psychoanalyst. In the opening of her book, therefore, Ragland-Sullivan examines the tension between these two roles and proposes to synthesize them in the course of her book.

What then follows is an exposition of Lacan's major theories, with Ragland-Sullivan providing commentary and context on his ideas about identity and subjectivity (Ch.1), the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis from Seminar XI (Ch.2), the impact of the Lacanian registers on the theory of cognition (Ch.3), Lacan's contribution to the theory of language (Ch.4), and finally, an exposition of Lacan's ideas about sexual identity (Ch.5).

Ragland-Sullivan's approach is clinical and well-researched, but boy is it ever didactic. From the outset it is clear that Lacan is the Master, that his ideas are the yardstick by which all else is to be measured, and any questioning or doubt is to be dismissed as a political attack or willful misreading. Particularly annoying, in this respect, is Ragland-Sullivan's habit of summarily dismissing critics who, I think, have a genuine point. For instance: "Roustang misinterprets Lacan's statments regarding the liquidation of a transference in analysis" (p.123) - but how? There are no quotations from Roustang, no analysis of his actual critique, just a two-sentence assertion that Lacan has been misread and Roustang is wrong.

"Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari miss the point..." (p.13); "Irigaray misreads Lacan in much the same way Deleuze and Guattari do..." (p.273); "Deleuze and Guattari also misrepresent Lacan..." (p.272); "Marxist Louis Althusser's famous misreading of Lacan..." (p.272) - the list of examples of this kind of defensive mindset goes on and on. Lacan is never, ever acknowledged by Ragland-Sullivan to be wrong or open to critique, so that in every circumstance his "inerrance" is merely the result of a misreading or a political distortion. All hail Saint Lacan.

I understand Ragland-Sullivan's position. She is a disciple who wishes to defend a system of thought (psychoanalysis) - and yet the paradox of her position is precisely that Lacan's thought is designed to liberate us from this kind of discipleship. Roustang is right when he claims, in Dire Mastery, that the goal of psychoanalysis is to abolish itself, and that it only evades this goal by the need to transmit its methodologies to a new generation. So while this book contains a lot of useful technical information about Lacan and his ideas, for me it betrays his project by trying to turn it into a kind of totalitarian orthodoxy.… (meer)