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. Lacan The Absolute Master. Translated by Douglas Brick. Stanford: Stanford UP. 1991.
Malcolm Bowie. Lacan. London: Montana, 1991.
Elizabeth Grosz. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.
How to read Jacques Lacan is a question. Lacan may be read, Malcolm Bowie suggests, as “one who can think fruitfully only from inside someone else's text” (7). The image of a creative renovator—occupying the texts of others, mounting extensive changes, and yet retaining features of the original work—partly explains why Lacan's texts continue to generate an industry of introductions. It is not only the style of his theoretical statements nor his calculated cultivation of obscurity. Lacan is a great appropriator. The task of the explicator is complicated by the alterations and rearrangements that concepts culled from diverse sources undergo in his work. Elizabeth Grosz and Malcolm Bowie primarily focus on Lacan's reading (or reinvention) of Freud. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen studies Lacan's debts to philosophical modes of thinking. Taken together and each alone, however, these critics construct the figure of a harlequin: Lacan as one who, although attired in a motley of borrowed ideas, represents a new and innovative contribution to psychoanalysis.
Bowie introduces his book simply as “an outline of Lacan's theory” (1). In five short chapters, he nonetheless carries out a more far-reaching project: tracing the stages of Lacan's thought