Review - Todd McGowan's Introduction to Lacan

Todd McGowan's new book is an excellent read and important book for those who are interested in Lacan. Over the years, I have read a lot of Lacan, along with Zizek, McGowan, Copjec, etc, and this by far is one of the best introductory books with lots of great examples. 

 

I love McGowan’s interpretation of Kant and Hegel in contextualizing Lacan’s three stages. The connection between Kant’s sensibility, understanding, and reason nicely line up with Lacan’s imaginary, symbolic and the Real in the first stage of Lacan’s work. But Lacan’s middle period turns to Hegel’s dialectic with his introduction of objet a (object cause of desire). McGowan claims that objet a, which is linked to the Real, is the fundamental object and perhaps one of Lacan’s greatest contributions. 

 

 

An example is Lacan’s concept of the gaze (which should not be confused with the look). The gaze (as the visual drive) demonstrates how our unconscious desire distorts the visual plane, something we don’t recognize in the everyday, but something movies can make apparent. McGowan offers Spielberg’s Duel as a great example. Lacan's examples are paintings, such as Las Meninas (see image below). The painter is painting a couple who we think are in the mirror image, located in the far background. For Lacan, the canvas is too big to be the mirror image. The canvas embodies the gaze because it does not fit within the representational world of the painting. As McGowan explains, the canvas demonstrates a resistance toward representation. 

  

Another example is The Ambassadors (see my blog post). When we encounter the gaze, we realize how our desire distorts the visual plane. The gaze is objet a within the field of vision. Encountering the gaze exemplifies that our spectatorship is not from a transcendent standpoint but within the painting or movie itself. That's where we locate the dialectic component of Lacan's work on desire.

I agree with McGowan that Lacan is the philosopher of the subject. The subject is always a split subject, a subject that is never at home with itself because of the unconscious. Lastly, it was great to read how many of Lacan’s concepts changed throughout his three periods, particularly the Real and jouissance. Highly recommend!