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By Ellie Ragland-Sullivan. Urbana/Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1986. 358 pp.
THE WORKS OF JACQUES LACAN. AN INTRODUCTION. By Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. 237 pp.
At least six books on Lacan have recently appeared. The best one is Shoshana Felman's Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight (Harvard University press, 1986). I call attention to it here because the reader should not confuse it with Ragland-Sullivan's book, which resembles it in name but in nothing else. The reader interested in learning about Lacan will find Felman's book superbly clear about both theoretical and clinical issues. In contrast, Ragland-Sullivan, Professor of English at the University of Florida, writes in a rambling, confusing, polemical manner that leaves the reader feeling mystified. The clear distinction Lacan makes between the ego and the subject becomes completely blurred and confounded by her stress on an entity she calls the "moi." In addition, the emphasis she gives to "official versions" (p. 309) and "official texts" (p. 310) suggests a concern for orthodoxy and doctrinal purity that is matched by her idolatry of Lacan, who, as she states, for example, "lived with the unusual burden of seeing further than his fellow beings" (p. xxi). We do not profit from such banalities as the assertion that Lacan used Freud's text "to explain the mysteries of the human drama" (p. 56). On the contrary, Lacan did not explain mysteries when he wrote that "the principle characteristic of my own human life … is that life is something which goes, as we say in French, à la dérive. Life goes down the river, from time to time touching a bank, staying for awhile here and there, without understanding anything…1 Perhaps the worst thing in this bad book is the way the author presents Lacan as if he were claiming to be "correcting" the