Against Adaptation: Lacan's 'Subversion' of the Subject, a Close Reading (review)

Due to what is commonly referred to as Lacan's "notorious difficulty," the vast majority of secondary literature produced by Lacanian scholars is aimed at providing a comprehensive introductory overview to the typically cryptic writings and oracular pronouncements of the French Freud. Commentaries on Lacan generally seek to highlight the most important theses traversing his theoretical developments, thereby furnishing a streamlined presentation that enables readers to get a sense of the fundaments underlying the Lacanian approach to psychoanalysis. Such scholarly works are necessary components in initiating the sustained effort to come to terms with Lacan's legacy. The very best of these sorts of commentaries make an articulate case for taking Lacan seriously as a thinker of the human condition, rather than dismissing him as yet another vapid postmodern obscurantist. Without them, his critics' dismissals of him as a nonsense monger risk appearing justified, and, consequently, Lacan's texts might well be promptly relegated to the dustbin of intellectual history.

At the outset of his project, Philippe Van Haute directly acknowledges the value of introductions to Lacan (i.e., macro-level surveys of an entire range of Lacan's texts). However, Van Haute senses that the time is ripe for a turn in Lacanian studies, for a shift towards what could be called "micro-level" investigations into specific facets of the Lacanian corpus. Lacanian scholars should indeed cooperate along the lines of a division of labor. Once the exegetical foundations for engaging with a given figure's oeuvre have been laid by a series of solid overviews, other scholars should feel themselves free to pursue more detailed and complex investigations into specific sub-constellations of concepts. Van Haute offers his study of Lacan's 1960 essay "Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious" (the final essay selected for inclusion in Alan Sheridan's 1977 English translation of the Écrits) as a "close reading." He presents his book as part of a turn towards Lacanian scholarship beyond the introductory level, beyond the stage of constructing comprehensive summaries of an entire series of works.

However, for a variety of reasons—his wise choice of text, his solid overall understanding of Lacan, his grasp of the philosophical issues at stake, his explanatory skills—Van Haute succeeds on both the micro-level as well as the macro-level. His close reading accomplishes nothing less than showing readers how to see the Lacanian universe in a textual grain of sand. In the "Subversion of the subject" essay, Lacan discusses his theory of the point de capiton (i.e., the "quilting point," a notion introduced in the third seminar of 1955-1956): central signifying units are, in terms of their capacity to signify and their assumption of a concrete meaning, shaped or conditioned by other such signifying units situated in a shared network of significance; but, in this network of signifiers, certain select signifiers (i.e., the quilting points) are absolutely pivotal in governing the dynamics of this system. Not all differentially defined signifiers are equal. One could say that Van Haute properly identifies this 1960 piece by Lacan as itself just such a point de capiton in his theoretical system.

Several aspects of "Subversion of the subject and the dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious" make it a paradigmatic example from Lacan's writings. Not only is it excessively baroque and overly dense in terms of the writing style, but it also is organized around the explication of an intricate visual graph (Lacan loves such quasi-mathematical models as illustrations of his theories). Consequently, even readers who are familiar with Lacanian ideas sometimes have trouble making out exactly what is transpiring in the course of this particular essay. Furthermore, the "Subversion of the subject" is situated right at the...