This slim volume contains two texts by Jacques Lacan. Taken by themselves, they are not particularly important or enlightening, so those unfamiliar with Lacan's work would probably be better reading something else. For those who know his work, however, these two pieces offer a fascinating insight into two key moments in Lacan's career.

The first text is "The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real," which Lacan delivered to a select group of colleagues on July 8, 1953, just before his "Rome Report" ("The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis") that would apply structural linguistics to psychoanalysis in such a revolutionary fashion. As Jacques-Alain Miller notes, Lacan's formulation of his three registers was inspired by Claude Lévi-Strauss's essay "The Effectiveness of Symbols" (1949). It should also be remembered that this talk occurs four months before Lacan begins Seminar I.

What is notable about this first text is just how basic it appears compared to Lacan's later work. Lacan seems to have worked out the main dialectic between symbolic and imaginary, and this is mainly what he delineates here. "You spoke to us about the symbolic and the imaginary," complains Serge Leclaire in the discussion afterward. "You didn't talk to us about the real" (p.42). While he is absolutely right, it will take Lacan a few years before he will correct this oversight in a satisfactory way.

The second text is "Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father," which constitutes the first entry in Lacan's eleventh seminar from 1963, which he abandoned upon receiving the news that he had lost his status as a training analyst, a fact he bitches and moans about throughout the whole seminar.

Lacan takes some time to warm up to his theme. He opens with a meditation on anxiety (the theme of Seminar X), and warns about the dangers of psychology. He makes an extraordinary remark about how Hegel's philosophy was a useful political move in undermining religion as a political and social order, but ultimately concludes that "Hegel's dialectic is false" (p.62). Lacan then considers the role of the Church fathers that he uses to converge with Freud's views on religion.

Freud, of course, designates religion as an illusion on the one hand, but is fascinated by his mythical Moses on the other. This leads into the most interesting part of the text, in which Lacan uses the story of Abraham to show how Jewish tradition founds a patriarchal law that self-consciously marks itself as different from one established by blood or biology (covenant), an act that is tied by Lacan to the father's name.

"El Shaddai is the one who chooses, who promises, and who creates through his name a certain alliance that is transmissable in only one way: by the paternal berakah [blessing]." (85)

The Old Testament God is often wrathful, indulging his own jouissance, but Lacan seems to want to explore how, particularly in the case of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, he actually negates his own jouissance in order to make room for a desire that founds the Hebraic law:

"Here we see a sharp divide between God's jouissance and what, in this tradition, is presented as His desire. The point is to diminish the importance of biological origin. This is the key to the mystery, in which can be seen the Judaic tradition's aversion to what we see everywhere else. The Hebrew tradition hates the practice of metaphysical/sexual rites which, during festivals, unite the community with God's jouissance. It highlights, on the contrary, the gap separating desire from jouissance." (p.88)

So why are the "names" of the father, rather than just a singular designation as it originally appeared in Seminar III? Lacan doesn't have a chance to explain fully, but hints that it stems from the fact that Abraham's god Ha Shem (meaning "The Name") is not yet a universal god. There are other tribes with other Elohim, and that means there are other names that may inscribe a paternal law.

While the first text is mostly valuable from a historical point of view, this second piece, this brief introduction to Lacan's aborted seminar, gives a sense that something important was lost. The extended commentary on Abraham, the covenant, paternal law, and jouissance promises so much, only to remain unfulfilled because of political circumstances. Thankfully, Lacan did resume his teaching the next year with the brilliant Seminar XI, but one can only wonder how much more enlightening that work would have been if it had been preceded by a full consideration of the Names-of-the-Father. ( )

Librería 3. Estante 3