Studying Lacan's Seminar IX

Reviews / Votes

'Two problems invariably confront any attempt to offer extensive commentary on Lacan's Seminar. There is the staggering range of Lacan's literary and scholastic references, firstly, and then there is the extended period of time that Lacan allows himself, over each year long-seminar, to lucubrate over a series of topics and questions in his own distinctively elliptical and elusive way. How then to respond to these challenges and offer a novel type of engagement, especially so in reference to a seminar as (relatively) neglected as Seminar IX? Well, by assembling a veritable 'dream team' of scholars - Olga Cox Cameon, Dan Collins and Don Kunze, each of whom have been immersed in the material for decades - one that is able to bypass the standard stereotypical readings of Lacan's work and isolate the questions and topics that have hitherto been missed or only inadequately appreciated. Working collaboratively, with a multi-disciplinary range exceeding that of any one scholarly expert, the team behind Studying Lacan's Seminar XI has produced a landmark in Lacanian scholarship, one which matches Lacan's conceptual brilliance with brilliance and originality all of its own.'
- Derek Hook, Professor of Psychoanalysis, Duquesne University, Psychoanalyst

'In this extensive volume of commentary, Olga Cox Cameron, Dan Collins, and Don Kunze take us on a romp through one of Lacan's most unusual seminars-Seminar IX: Identification-highlighting, problematizing, and clarifying such arid topics as the unary trait, the topology of Moebius strips, tori, and cross caps, the origin of the psychoanalytic subject, the fundamental fantasy, object a, i(a), and more. They present Lacan's transitional work here in the context of what came before in his seminars and what was soon to come in his work. The reader should expect to come away enlightened, perplexed, and even ... disoriented.'
-Bruce Fink, Lacanian Psychoanalyst, Author, and Translator