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This book features a collection of papers delivered at the Paris “Lacan Seminars in English” in 1990, with members of the École de la Cause freudienne (ECF) giving the majority of the lectures, complemented by contributions made by several scholars from other countries.2 The essays are generally marked by clarity and precision in their explication of Lacanian concepts. The talks given by Miller, Laurent, Soler, Fink, and Quinet, in particular, make this collection by far the best pedagogical tool 1 can find for introducing students to Lacan's Seminar XI.
In contrast to other English publications on Lacan, this book has the additional merit of reading the dynamics of The Four Fundamental Concepts in the context of the institutional struggles carried out by Lacan as he sought to establish his own school of psychoanalysis. One prominent way in which this anthology departs from former Anglo-American Lacanian scholarship is its emphasis on Lacan's difference from, rather than his “return to,” Freud. Miller, Soler, and Fink present very convincing articulations of these differences. Of these, Miller's lecture orients our reading of the entire collection. By outlining Seminar XI against the backdrop of Lacan's “break” from Freud, he enables us to understand anew the concept of the “Name-of-the-Father” and its history (6-7).
The ECF members' critique of the cult of the dead father can assume yet another level of significance for their American addressees. The editors' positioning of the essays by French and American scholars seems to suggest that, in the course of the ECF members' explanation of Lacan's break from Freud, and the Ecole freudienne's break from the International Psychoanalytic Association, a transferential separation between the American scholars and their French predecessors also quietly asserted itself. In the unfolding of the dialectical desire between the subject and its other, between the French “mentors” and their American “disciples,” the subversion of th