While I think Bruce Fink is a good translator of Jacques Lacan's texts, my reading of [b:Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely|85847|Lacan to the Letter Reading Écrits Closely|Bruce Fink|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347917489s/85847.jpg|82844] gave me a fairly negative view of his work as a critic and commentator. For me, Fink is too much of a disciple, and that lack of a critical distance speaks to the weakness of his arguments.

Lacan on Love didn't really change my views on Fink - he remains too uncritical of Lacan for his books to be genuinely groundbreaking. Nonetheless, this particular work is unquestionably useful in certain respects. For the reader who is new or unversed in Lacanian concepts, Fink is almost painstakingly gentle, giving numerous examples that walk the reader through the various psychoanalytic concepts.

Now, as an advanced reader, there is a danger that I would find this book condescending or trite, but it is to Fink's credit that I did not. There are certain concepts of Lacan's that I am still struggling to clarify or articulate, and Fink's detailed explanations helped - this was particularly true with regard to the positions of the obsessional neurotic and the hysteric. I owe my clearer understanding of these terms to this book.

The text itself is divided into four sections, with the first three dedicated to looking at love through the Lacanian registers of the symbolic, imaginary, and real.

The first section, on the symbolic, explains love through the notion of structural positions. In these situations, the relational position between lover and beloved determines the nature of the emotional investment. This can be thought, for instance, from the aforementioned perspective of neurotic and hysteric. Neurotics tend to fall in love with people who are impossible or inaccessible: thus, their love is structural, rather than an indicator of the beloved's actual qualities. Similar structures can be seen in the Oedipus complex, or in the analytical transference, where desire largely ignores who the person actually is in favor of their position in the symbolic structure.

The second section focuses on the imaginary, thus turning the attention onto the subject's primary narcissism. Fink thus explains how love might be interpreted through either the fantasies we have about others, or as a reflection of our own self-image.

While these first two sections are detailed and convincing, the third section on the real is a disappointment. Fink begins well enough, pointing to examples like repetition compulsion (where someone repeats the same traumatic pattern over and over again without understanding why) and "unsymbolizable" factors that the subject cannot identify, but this chapter is brief, vague, and unsatisfying. Fink is clearly uncomfortable with the findings of the later Lacan, the Lacan of the real that is so central to Žižek's work, and it is reflected here.

The fourth section consists of "General Considerations on Love," a title that is as nebulous as it sounds. The first part talks about how difficult it is to define love, using numerous historical and cultural to show that it is a slippery term. The second part is an in-depth reading of Seminar VIII, at the beginning of which Lacan gives a detailed reading of Plato's [b:The Symposium|81779|The Symposium|Plato|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1520522475s/81779.jpg|1488719]. If you've read Seminar VIII, you don't need to read Fink's piece-by-piece summary of it.

Overall, Lacan on Love was a book of two halves. The first two sections on the symbolic and imaginary were helpful and insightful, whereas the last two were vague and mostly unnecessary. Fink is a good, low-level commentator on Lacan's work, but as I said before, his books are never going to be genuinely groundbreaking. ( )