Jane Gallop's debut Feminism and Psychoanalysis turned out to be an unexpected pleasure, a book that triumphs because it takes seriously the task not only of criticism, but of self-criticism. Gallop, in short, writes with a searching sense of honesty and self-scrutiny that is both winning and critically incisive.

Gallop's earlier book did focus on Lacan, but it was mainly in order to place his ideas about female sexuality and the phallus from Seminar XX in dialogue with feminist thinkers. Reading Lacan, by contrast, consists of Gallop's interpretations of selections from Écrits, with a specific focus on those that were available in English translation at the time (the full text of Écrits was not translated until 2006).

Gallop sprinkles her text with little notes, some theoretical, some personal - this "experimental" move is indicative of the 1980s context in which she is writing. Some are insightful, some come across as a little pretentious.

The Prefatory Material opens with a meditation on the meaning and purpose of "women's studies." She then makes the argument that Lacan's notion of universal castration and his subversion of the "subject who is supposed to know" constitute a challenge to authority that aligns with the feminist project. I am not so sure that this is necessarily true, but I am inclined to agree with this premise. Finally, she looks at how the intersection between literature and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work allows us to be both analyst and analysand at the same time. Self-reflexive Gallop is in the house.

Chapter 1 deals with a number of meditations on how to read Écrits. The first is a contemplation of Écrits itself is a "lure," drawing readers in because of its similarity to literature, but eluding us nonetheless because, in the end, it escapes that label. The second is a look at the way Lacan simultaneously utilizes and subverts the notion of "mastery." The third is a comparison of Lacan's text to Roland Barthes's opposition between readerly and writerly texts, arguing that Lacan belongs to the latter. The fourth examines the difficulties of translation and the ambiguities of Lacan's French. Overall, the thesis of the chapter seems to be that students of literature might *think* they recognize a familiar series of textual strategies in Écrits, but the reality is that they are encountering something radically new and subversive.

Chapter 2 (focus: "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'") is a brilliant analysis of the back-and-forth interplay between Lacan and American culture. The negative side of this equation comes from Lacan's hatred of American ego-psychology, while its positive side is provided by his admiration of Poe. A further layer to this discussion is the fact that Poe, who was an admirer of French culture, was first lionized by French readers: in other words, did they mirror each other? Gallop closes with an amazing consideration of the fact that both Dupin and Lacan may be decoys to draw our attention away from where the "real" analysis is happening.

Chapter 3 (focus: "The Mirror Stage...") is another remarkable chapter, in which Gallop uses the unusual publication history of Lacan's paper to point to the uncertainty of the origin. Indeed, she undoubtedly embarrassed Jean-Michel Palmier, who makes a gesture toward Lacan's early text - which, as it turns out, exists only as a footnote. Which "mirror stage" comes first: the missing original or its re-written double? Gallop also skewers Catherine Clément's claim that the mirror stage "is the germ containing everything" - a violation of Lacan's caution to his audience not to project onto his work the false notion that things are "already there" when they are in reality a product of new insights. The rest of the chapter sees Gallop exploring in depth this temporal paradox: if the mirror stage is the moment that brings into being the very notion of order, then how can we possibly think about what came "before" order, since doing so can only be achieved through the window that was opened up by the mirror stage.

Chapter 4 (focus: "The Freudian Thing") is a difficult but wonderful chapter that focuses on the "correct" location of the unconscious. Using Freud's hometown of Vienna as the shifting center of her discussion - think of the castle in Kafka's novel - Gallop runs the reader through a dizzying series of wordplays and conceptual slips that show how, whenever we think we have grasped the unconscious, it eludes us. Vienna is never quite where we think it is.

Chapter 5 (focus: "The Agency of the Letter...") reflects more deeply on the question of Lacan's style. Gallop then heads into the Lacanian territory that I like least, with an extended discussion of metaphor and metonymy, followed by an attempt to read his mathemes/formulae as something between a poem and a rebus.

Chapter 6 (focus: "The Signification of the Phallus") returns to territory covered in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, with an extended discussion of the difference between the "phallus" and the "penis." Since it goes over old ground, I found this chapter to be by far the least rewarding in the book.

Chapter 7 (focus: "The Subversion of the Subject...") examines the difficult nuances of Lacan's claim that "God is unconscious," as opposed to "God is dead." Comparing this notion to Barthes's concept of the dead author, Gallop notes the subtleties and advantages of the Lacanian formula for both literature and atheism.

With the exception of Chapter 6, I found Reading Lacan to be an even stronger work than Gallop's first book. Her insights into Lacan are often dazzling, especially for the way she is able to take complex ideas and turn them over and over so that the reader can see all their various nuances. While it's not quite a perfect book, its audacity, insight, and intellectual fearlessness nonetheless merit its five star rating. ( )