Lacan the Charlatan

Reviews / Votes

"Lacan the Charlatan is much more than a highly engaging study of Lacan's various critics, detractors, and would-be debunkers. It focuses in on one of the essential problems of his psychoanalytic theory: the nature of authority under conditions of modernity. Clown, guru, master, imposter, insurgent, analyst: Mathews shows how Lacan both incarnated and exposed the impasses of authority, and how his theoretical framework is crucial for understanding the charade of power and mastery we are living in today."

(Aaron Schuster, author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis)

"Mathews is that rarest of scholar in psychoanalytic studies: someone brave enough to consult works he disagrees with, and then able to produce smart, judicious, and fair-minded commentary and critique. Likewise, his interventions into the work and legacies of the best critics of Lacan, such as Roustang and Borch-Jacobsen, is not just overdue; it is often revelatory. Lacan the Charlatan is a major contribution to the literature - one of interest to scholars of literature, philosophy, and sociology - that will still be worth reading in twenty years."

(Todd Dufresne, Professor of Philosophy, Lakehead University, USA)