Reconstruction 5.1 (Winter 2005)

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Bruce Fink. Lacan to the Letter: Reading Ecrits Closely. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. pp. 1-328, ISBN: 0816643210, $24.95.

<1> Why a new book on Lacan? Bruce Fink declares, in the beginning of his preface, that his book tries to meet a challenge: take Lacan to his word, i.e., read Lacan's text down to its actual letter and literally. The assumption behind this challenge is that Lacan's letter says something and has to be understood as a full part (element?) of his theoretical approach of psychoanalysis. It is necessary to point out that this challenge is two fold: First, it is completely essential to any understanding of Lacan's late works, to take him literally. Lacan himself, states "Mais cette lettre comment faut-il la prendre ici? Tout uniment, à la lettre" (Essais, 492). Second, it is as much essential to understand that each of Lacan's iterative use of a letter (S, a, A, s(a) or I(A) ) is aimed at creating a new knowledge and not at repeating something which was already said (or written) before. That's why, as Bruce Fink clearly writes, Lacan may use "s" twice in the same formula with two different meanings (i.e., for S/s = s, the first "s" is "signified," the second is "statement").

<2> As a French native speaker I would like to add that this challenge is an almost impossible one to fulfil, as Lacan cares a lot about writing in a way "que je prefère difficile" -- "that I -- Lacan -- would like difficult" (Essais, 490). Fink's book meets this challenge with great success for many reasons. One of them, which is the basic one, is that he translates Lacan's text into English with a rare talent: he understands Lacan's complicated French very well (he actually understands it to the letter, which is the only way to understand it well) and re-writes it in a clear English, loosing by the way some of the obscure shifts in words order that Lacan, out of precocity (as much as because of the meaning he intends to produce), stuffs his texts with. Finks understands Lacan to the letter and is not fooled (nor infuriated says he) in the process, being able to sort out what the letter means and what it just shows.

<3> A second reason that makes this book a new and useful one is that Fink explains in chapters four and five literally to the (many) letter(s), one of Lacan's most obscure concept: the graph of desire. This graph is a double horse shoe (one above the other) crossed by a double curve (one above the other) with some short cuts . . . and a (or several) letter (s) at each intersection. It has been slowly elaborated over the years, written in 1960 and published in 1966. It summarizes (or synthesises?) Lacan's ideas about science, the subject of science, the desire of the subject of science for knowledge... and the impossibility for psychoanalysis to behave as a human science. It re-uses letters that have been present in various writings since the late thirties (such as a -- little other -- which appeared in 1936, or A -- large Other -- which dates back to 1955, or many other letters. . .). Fink closely follows the letter of the text, explaining it step by step and showing why, from one state of the graph to the next (there are three successive sketches before the full grown final graph is achieved) Lacan shifts from a "delta" to a "barred S", why he adds Italian words to Greek symbols and solves them into a French mathematical invention, the root of the negative one. One may just regret that Fink doesn't go further in his study, and let aside what Lacan (in séminaire XX, 1973) describes as "moins que un" (less than one) and not only as the negative of +1. This less than one casts a new light on the minus one that Bruce Fink says could replace the "signifier of the lack in the other" in the graph. This might be an interesting aspect to study.

<4> A third reason that makes the book useful is the quest for ironical intelligence that this book deals with in many pages. Discussing Sokal and Bricmont's charge against" fashionable nonsense," Bruce Fink uses some hard irony (and some softer formulas) to demonstrate they did not actually understood what Lacan meant. Sokal and Bricmont were -- probably -- unable to accept that letters, bars, figures, numbers, are not the private property of one single and only type of logic. Bruce Fink writes that Lacan uses these symbols for a form of "formalization" that is unrelated to quantification. This algebraic formulation doesn't have to follow the mathematical rules and may well end with a square root of the minus one. There is no nonsense here; though there may be some problems in the way Lacan plays, later, with this algebra. At other places in the book Fink lets some devastating irony leak towards former translations, or essays on Lacan. His own book may well be an argument to explain he has some right to feel he understands Lacan more precisely, to the exact letter, than many others. This is why it is a very useful book.

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