Mark Bracher

Lacan and the Subject of Language boasts a star-studded line-up of writers on Lacan, from Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan's son-in-law and legal heir) to Russell Grigg (one of the best translators of Lacan into English) to Slavoj Žižek (whose star has since risen to make him one of the leading theorists writing today).

The collection came out at a time when the star of high theory had not yet begun to wane, when books like this were a dime a dozen - I know, because I have recently been reading my way through a bunch of them. The quality of the essays collected here is reasonably even in quality (not surprising, given the star power of the contributors), but there is nothing, at the same time, that stands out as particularly innovative and surprising.

In part, I would attribute that shortcoming to the book's choice of topic, which to me tends to limit the discussion to the structuralist-linguistic aspects of the early-to-middle periods of Lacan's work. Indeed, Žižek does his best to toe the line, at first, and then only later breaks with these language-bound constraints by appealing to the notion of symptom/sinthome that emerges in the later work of Lacan. I would love to have seen more such inventiveness in this collection, but the other pieces were largely academic and very, very serious.… (mere)

I've been interested in Bracher's work for the past decade. He is a Lacanian (more or less) in the field of educational pedagogy. In this book he clearly makes a strong case for a type of pedagogy that strengthens students' identity as opposed to merely feeding them information and getting them to rehash it on a test. He is philosophically opposed to mainstream pedagogical theories and argues convincingly for a psychoanalytic based teaching method. If you understand or are in any way familiar with Lacan's 4 discourses, you will be happy to know that Bracher bases his pedagogy on this outline. A fascinating and well written book. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in educational studies particularly pedagogical studies, or have an interest generally in the work of Jacques Lacan.… (mere)