Book Review Essay: “Quilting Lacan” A Review of Todd McGowan’s “The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan”

Abstract

Todd McGowan’s Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan offers a systematic treatment of Jacques Lacan’s thought, salvaging it from its self-inflicted obscurantism. McGowan traces the development and regression of Lacan’s thought, unashamedly privileging the “middle Lacan” as the most philosophical and politically fecund for Lacanian theory by situating Lacan in both his intellectual and historical context, and between the philosophical cornerstones of Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel. Providing some important corrections to the common reception of Lacan, McGowan distinguishes Lacanian theory from post-structuralism through the maintenance of the subject, which thus secures the emancipatory potential of Lacan’s thought. Tracing out the effects of these periodisations in terms of their political stakes—namely, on the question of the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics, and the fate of “recognition” as carried over from Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel—McGowan’s introduction provokes some interesting questions concerning the ethical and political potential of psychoanalysis that invite further consideration.

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