Against Understanding Volume 1 by Fink Bruce

Author:Fink, Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134516063
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Sheridan uses the word “mediatization” here, which is certainly just as correct as my choice and which has the same set of meanings as the French term used by Lacan, médiatisation. But it’s a rather rare term and my sense is that the most common way of expressing in English the meaning I believe Lacan has in mind here is with the verb “to mediate.” Lacan’s point here seems to me to be that man’s knowledge, like his desire, comes to be mediated by the other’s desire.

Next, it looks like Sheridan translated concurrence as “co-operation” instead of as “competition.” Concurrence can mean both (as can English words such as “sanction,” which means both to approve and punishment depending on its context and use as a verb or noun), but the context here—which involves the “drama of primordial jealousy” between siblings or semblables—seems to me to dictate “competition.”

Regarding the “it” you bolded, notice that Sheridan’s phrasing is a bit more ambiguous than mine. In Sheridan’s text it seems as if the I might correspond to a natural maturation process, but the pronoun that Lacan uses is elle, which is feminine and thus refers back to la poussée des instincts. So what he’s saying is that the instincts become a threat to the I even if they are part of a natural maturation process like puberty.

There are many commonly accepted Lacanian terms, such as “aggressivity” and “mediatization,” that don't show up in your new translation. “Reflexion” and “quadrature,” just to name a few neologisms, are also nowhere to be found. Were these neologisms not really of Lacan’s making and just the creation of English translators?

Well, you know, even though I've changed “aggressivity” to the more common English “aggressiveness,” the latter is still rather rare in English. Psychoanalysts and ethologists talk far more about “aggression” (as in Konrad Lorenz’s book, On Aggression) than about “aggressiveness.” Often I was tempted to just translate agressivité as “aggression.”

Anyway, I think readers have come to falsely associate Lacan’s early work with neologisms partly as a result of Sheridan’s and Jacqueline Rose’s translations (she introduces the hardly believable “psychologicists”). The terms Lacan uses are wide-ranging and anything but everyday, but there are few neologisms to be found in his writings until quite a bit later, above all, in the 1970s. Many of those aren't even very well known (hommoinzun, jouis-sens, l'âmour, etc.), and often they're highly contextualized. A number of them in Seminar XX are rather difficult to transplant or take out of the particular contexts in which Lacan introduced them. They're often just plays on words that never become full-fledged concepts.

Of course, I simply imported the French term jouissance and didn't try to translate it at all. My sense is that the word is well enough known now after 30-odd years of Lacan scholarship and translations; people are pretty familiar with it and it really doesn't require that much glossing. It is true that the student new to Lacan still won't understand it, but I think that

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