Bruce Fink, who is a better Lacanian scholar than I will ever be, warns that to understand Lacan, it is insufficient to be merely absolutely fluent in French. Instead, it is necessary to have lived and studied in Paris for at least nine years, to have absorbed through immersion its singular intellectual and psychoanalytic culture. Yet Fink also says that Lacan's "work obviously fits into a historical, philosophical, literary, and psychiatric context . . ., all the elements of which no person could ever hope to master." This is sobering for someone like myself, whose French is far from perfect—je parle francais comme une vache espagnole—and who has visited Paris only once, just long enough to get upbraided by a psychoanalytic bookstore manager for leaning on her radiator.

My only recourse is to extrapolate Lacan's own advice:

Commencez par ne pas croire que vous comprenez. Partez de l'idée du malentendu fondamental.

Begin by thinking you don't understand. Start from the idea of a fundamental misunderstanding.

My strategy is not to just begin with misunderstanding, but to continue doing so. This may just be recycled Harold Bloom, but it remains good Harold Bloom. The manifest impossibility of my ever becoming expert in Lacanian theory doesn't mean I can't work productively with it right now. Such work, in its acknowledged limitations, at least resists the desperate academic claim to expertise as the defining means of sustaining one's legitimacy as an thinker, as if rigor could redeem the subject from annihilation/castration, or escape its rigid and cadaverous connotations.

I'm not a good Lacanian scholar; I'm not trying to be. I'm just another bad Lacanian subject. Cogito ergo zoom (I think, therefore I go fast).

Here's what I've done. Here's what I'm doing.

In another order of things, less fraught, she might have said,
Tell me a story, the way people did around a fire late at night. . . .

She would have asked,
Was there really a tree? Did it happen that way?
         
And I would have said,
That was one way it could have happened.
And the yes and the no, the precision things took on in the plain world,
would not have mattered so much,
only the story, that bit of hope.