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This is a difficult but mostly delightful book, whether one know a little or a lot about Lacan. Among the approximately 20 introductory books on Lacan in English, it is also unusual. It attempts neither to survey comprehensively Lacan's productions nor, through summary explication, to advocate their literary-theoretical or philosophical utility. The book originated as notes for a series of lectures Weber gave at the Free University of West Berlin some 20
years ago. These talks were designed as a general introduction to the Écrits, Lacan's selected writings, which had been published in France in 1966 but were then little known in the German-speaking world (a highly selected version of the Écrits was released in English in the U. S. in 1977 [Lacan, 1977]). Weber hopes his text will “help readers to make their ways [in] to the Écrits, which remain the most densely charged laboratory of the Lacanian experiment” (p. xiii).
Weber's relatively brief but densely plotted work is yet another—but, finally, especially translucent—window opening onto the Lacanian field and shedding light outward from an epistemological position informed by the ideas of deconstruction. This approach to textual interpretation burst onto the scene in 1967, with the simultaneous publication of three works by Jacques Derrida. Weber's use of Derrida is free of deconstructionist excess. He uses deconstruction to sharpen the acuity of his unpacking Saussure's (chapters 3 and 4) and Lacan's texts so as to “discern [the] movement [of language] and call attention to the contradictions that permeate a text despite the writer's best intentions” (Muller and Richardson, 1988, p. 169).
Weber's success in this endeavor is astonishing. This is one of the few works of its type that does not simply meet Lacan on his own terms—a major feat in itself!—but provides a penetrating reading of Lacan that by and large helps make sense of the development of his ideas. Of course, without translator Michael Levine's labor thi