Jacques Lacan's seminars have always been published in a sporadic, out-of-sequence manner. The first seminar to be published in both French and English was Seminar XI, for instance. The English translation of Seminar XIX only came out in August 2018, on the heels of Seminar V in 2017. Establishing a sense of the development of Lacan's ideas can be hard, given both this random choice of publication dates and the gaps in the record. How nice it will be when everything is available to read in its proper sequence.

I should start by saying that this work beautifully translated and produced. While many readers like Bruce Fink's translations of Lacan into English, I tend to regard Russell Grigg as the best. Both are excellent when it comes to clear and readable prose, but I feel that Grigg's theoretical grasp of Lacan's work as a whole is superior, and that this is reflected, in turn, in how he presents Lacan in translation.

One thing that is immediately noticeable about Seminar V is just how incredibly long it is. Lacan's other seminars usually clock in at somewhere between 150 and 300 pages, whereas this one is a massive 500 pages long. The reason is that so much of the seminar is taken up not only with commentary on Freud's work, but also a myriad of other contemporary psychoanalysts - Klein, Jones, Bouvet, etc. - that are now mainly of interest only to clinicians and historians.

At the heart of Seminar V is Lacan's exploration of the subject and Other, particularly how these connect through the symbolic order. Part 1, for instance, shows how intertwined this pair really is through a consideration of jokes and comedy: for a joke to work, Lacan points out, it ultimately has to be acknowledged by the Other. Part 2 explores how this idea relates to the Oedipus complex, with Lacan increasingly transforming this Freudian idea into something symbolic and formal. Part 3 looks at the difference between a demand (what is expressed through signifiers) and desire (what the subject actually wants), and how human desire is always mediated through language. Part 4 focuses more attention on the Other, especially in light of neurotic obsession.

Seminar V contains some important ideas that belong to what turns out to be the end of the "early" Lacan period, of the Lacan who is heavily influenced by Claude Lévi-Strauss's linguistic structuralism. There are rumblings in Seminar VI that something is about to change, resulting in the dramatic rupture that is Seminar VII on the topic of ethics and psychoanalysis, probably Lacan's greatest and important work. That will lead, in turn, to Seminar XI, in which Lacan returns to the questions of subject and Other presented here in order to begin a profound questioning of the viability of psychoanalysis itself. For that reason alone, Seminar V is important.

Nonetheless, I can't give this book more than three stars, because while it hints at the aforementioned breakthroughs, they have not yet even close to breaking the surface of Lacan's thought. What is striking about Seminar V is just how much this Lacan remains an avid disciple of Freud (and Lévi-Strauss) rather than a true innovator, so that while there are numerous glimmers of something more, they are draped in a language of psychoanalytic convention that I found really tedious to slog through, especially in the latter parts of the book.

Overall, then, Seminar V is one of those books you read mainly for historical purposes, to see where the seeds of what will become great ideas originated from, before they truly germinated and came into their own. ( )