From Fink's "Reading 'The Instance of the Letter In the Unconscious'":
Those who havebeen reading Lacan for some time know how frustrating it can be to locate a particular thesis about, say, anxiety, and build on it and attempt to apply it clinically. Is this a neurotic strategy on Lacan's part: avoidance? Is he avoiding being pinned down because that would require him to take a stand, to put it all on the line with a particular thesis and argument, and expose himself to castration (that is, limitation, critique and the like)? I do not think neurotic avoidance can be ruled out so easily, and yet it hardly seems to be the whole story. Indeed, to classify this avoidance as neurotic presumes that providing a concrete thesis is a worthy goal, in and of itself. In other words, it would be to adopt an obsessive standard for theory: theory has to produce a discrete, discernible object (a turd of sorts) for us to examine (admire or scorn).
A great deal of theoretical writing adopts this very presupposition, which is essentially an obsessive bias associated, for the most part, with what we might cavalierly call "anal male academic writing." Why should this be the yardstick by which Lacan's writing is measured? Perhaps we should admire, rather, not the final product but the flow or process of Lacan's writing: its twists and turns, recursive style and movement. (66)
I really enjoy the idea of understanding certain types of academic writing as infantile excretory processes. Beyond that though, I wonder to what extent this describes our frustration with Lacan (if we indeed feel frustration when reading him - I know I often do). Does our frustration consist in the lack (!) of systematic consistency, transparency and lucidity? It feels like we're put in an impossible place when we're asked to read Lacan, ostensibly to develop an understanding of psychoanalytic concepts, while he is allowed to reserve the caveat that we will never be able to systematize what he's saying in a stable way. Is Lacan's writing a performance of the analyst's occupation of the place of object a? I guess it pretty obviously is. And it's probably why Fink is so incredibly satisfying to read: he does the exact opposite, by explaining Lacan's key concepts in a straightforward manner. However, I'd like to suggest, contra Fink, that "admiration" of Lacan's opacity is precisely the wrong thing to do - because it suggests "appreciation" at the level of style, an aestheticization of Lacan's writing. Rather, we should make every effort to sustain our frustration with Lacan's enigmatic prose. In other words, do you agree that when we believe we've pinned down a concept that we should force ourselves into an "uncomfortable" relation with it, complicating it, looking for where it fails to apply, exceptions to the case, etc.? This reading strategy would seem to get us out of the kind of metonymic self-evidencing problem that Derrida claims is the rhetorical strategy of psychoanalysis. In short, should our reading strategy be one of refusing moments of structural consistency that might seem to arise in the course of our reading?
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