You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
How does Jacques Lacan speak to us today? How can we, or should we, read Lacan today? Or, as Sergio Benvenuto asks in the Foreword to Conversations with Lacan, “Which reading of Lacan can be recommended today? In other words, what is still interesting in Lacan today, what is alive of him?” (2020, p. 5). These are some of the motivating questions of Benvenuto's lucid and wide-ranging engagement with the thought, speech, and writing of Jacques Lacan. Benvenuto has published widely on a range of topics in psychoanalysis, including a fascinating approach to the gaze in modern art (Benvenuto, 2013), and this book, written in a very engaging personal style, has the feel of someone at ease in its discourses and practices.
To situate his intervention, Benvenuto summarizes three dominant approaches to reading Lacan today in the Foreword to his book: 1) scientific approaches that privilege truth and contemporary research, thereby focusing on “themes that are important,” 2) the philological—or historical-hermeneutical—approaches found in history and the humanities that privilege “the texts of certain authors,” and 3) a positive or negative “militant exegesis” that treats texts as “absolute” or “sacred” (2020, pp. 6-7). Examples of the third approach include the work of analysts who read Lacan to prove their positions to be “correct” (2020, p. 7). Benvenuto offers a helpful analogy to such an approach when he refers to leftists who read Marx and his inheritors to validate their own political ideology. Given this setup, Benvenuto unsurprisingly claims to practice none of the three approaches. Instead, Benvenuto's “interest is in deconstructing” Lacan, “an approach […] based on a sort of deconstructive piety” (2020, p. 8). Such a reading, he claims, will address both theoretical and clinical approaches to Lacan, as well as their limitations. This double approach remains faithful to psychoanalysis as a practice, and it also reminds readers that Benvenuto is himself a practicing ana