This volume was consistent in style, clarity, and tone with Reading Seminars I&II. That is, some of the work was really helpful and illuminating and other parts were less so. Alienation and separation are such key ideas in Lacan and I appreciated the depth and rigor of the essays, and the different perspectives.

Seminar XI was the first text by Lacan that I ever read. I still remember the photocopied pages I had from the chapters dealing with alienation and the "subject who is supposed to know," two of Lacan's very best ideas. Alongside Seminar VII (on ethics), Seminar XI is, for me, represents the very best of Lacan's work.

This collection starts off with a bang. The introduction by Jacques-Alain Miller - whom I normally don't like - is superb. Seminar XI was the first seminar that Miller attended, before he became Lacan's son-in-law and leading acolyte, and he recalls crucial details about the context and historical importance of that particular year for Lacan's career. More than that, Miller actually provides some genuinely crucial insights into some of the theoretical developments from that seminar, especially his comments on Lacan's innovative separation of transference and repetition. The introduction is, in short, quite brilliant, and eclipses everything else in the book.

Unfortunately, the rest of the collection is kind of a mess. What I really wanted was a contextual and critical analysis of the seminar's main ideas in a similar to what Roudinesco achieves in outlining the various intellectual influences on Lacan in her biography. Such a task would no doubt have had far more coherence if done by a single author, whereas the various authors in this book seem to take whatever angle they choose.

Some of the authors, it is true, do focus on key concepts: Éric Laurent talks about alienation and separation, for example, and Colette Soler looks at the concept of subject and other, but there is a repeated sense that these authors are just nibbling around the edges of these concepts rather than digging into them deeply.

Even less appropriate to this book, in my opinion, were the various attempts to "apply" the ideas from Lacan's seminar to outside texts, whether it was Richard Feldstein's reading of [b:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass|24213|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass|Lewis Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1327872220s/24213.jpg|2375385] or Slavoj Žižek's analysis of David Lynch. Such interpretations took focus away from the actual significance of Lacan's seminar.

The other thing that was sorely missing from this collection was a discussion of the "subject who is supposed to know" - this is perhaps my favorite Lacanian concept, and a crucial one for his critique of authority, especially with regard to the analyst's desire. It is unbelievable that it was so neglected here.

Apart from Miller's excellent introduction, then, Reading Seminar XI is a true disappointment. Perhaps it was always going to be that way, given that the heterogeneity of its authors could hardly provide the coherent commentary this seminar deserves, but I suspect it could nonetheless have been done better, at least, than this. ( )