On Feminine Sexuality

The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Encore 1972-1973, Vol. 20

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by Jacques Lacan,

Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller,

Translated by Bruce Fink

W. W. Norton and Co.

Due/Published February 1998, 192 pages, cloth

ISBN 0393045730

Lacan takes us on a startling psycholinguistic exploration of the bounds of love and knowledge. Often controversial, always inspired, French intellectual Jacques Lacan begins the twentieth year of his famous Seminar by weighing theories of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge from such influential and diverse thinkers as Aristotle, Marx, and Freud. From here he leads us through mathematics, philosophy, religion, and, naturally, psychoanalysis into an entirely new and unexpected way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives. Anticipated by English-speaking readers for more than twenty years, this annotated translation presents Lacan's most sophisticated work on love, desire, and jouissance.

Also available from Lacan's Seminar: Book I, Freud's Writings on Technique; Book II, The Theory of the Ego in Psychoanalytic Theory; Book III, The Psychoses; Book VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis; and Book XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (all from Norton).

Review

Jacques is bacques! Well, not really, this is part of Norton's series of first-time English translations of Jacques Lacan's famous seminars. In these discussions Lacan explores two of our major pursuits -- love and knowledge. This edition (Fink's notes are very clear, helpful and insightful) as with all of the new translations help bring into better focus some of the key ideas put forth by Lacan that are often lost in the growing number of interpretations and reinterpretations of his work. This seminar explores the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge. Lacan looks at thinkers such as Aristotle, Marx and Freud.

Lacan writes, "I spoke a bit of love. Yet the crux or key to what I put forward this year concerns the status of knowledge, and I stressed that the use (exercice) of knowledge could but imply (représenter) a jouissance. That is what I'd like to add to today by a reflection concerning what is done in a groping manner in scientific discourse with respect to what can be produced by way of knowledge."