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I keep trying to understand Lacan, by reading him and those who have tried to explicate his ideas, by involving myself in a Lacan study group,
and by talking with Lacanians whenever possible. But the fruits of my labors have been limited, for several reasons I've been able to identify. Lacan was not only a difficult thinker but one committed to being obscurantist. Often his reader is not sure that Lacan wanted to be understood. There is almost always something “barbed” (as if intentionally covered in barbed wire, as if he wanted to cause pain and to antagonize in the encounter) about the way that Lacan writes. Also, my inherited Anglo-American philosophical categories do not seem to serve as a basis to support the encounter with Lacan. Finally, I'm not a reader of French, although I also suspect that being a French reader would be of relatively little help in grasping Lacan's thought. Collectively, these issues pose a formidable barrier, if not a barricade, to my understanding Lacan.
I am no stranger to challenging texts. But there is no writer harder to read than Lacan. He is more challenging than Heidegger or Hegel. It is difficult to think that a country that has given us the prose of Montaigne, Rousseau, Voltaire, Flaubert, Sartre, and Levi-Strauss would also have produced, and supported, Lacan's. In his most famous published papers, at least, one often has the impression that he had mastered a form of thinking and speaking that is akin to automatic writing, or a nonpsychotic form of schizophasia. One often feels the more pained for having attempted the encounter with him, as in a meeting with the thorniest rosebush.
I have come to believe that persistence pays certain dividends though. At its best, Lacanian thought opens new vistas on the psychoanalytic discovery. Reading Lacan helps sharpen awareness of the ultimate power, and ultimate ingenuity, of the unconscious. Lacan highlights the Faustian elements in Freud's first inventions of psychoanalysis better th