You're listening to a London Review of Books podcast.

This lecture, as you know, is called Against Self-criticism.

The epigraph is from the painter Benjamin Robert Hayden's diary, and it is,

a man's liberty is gone the moment he becomes official. Lacan famously remarked that there must be something ironic about Christ's injunction

to love thy neighbor as thyself, because actually people hate themselves.

Indeed, it seemed rather as if, given the way people treat each other, they'd always loved their neighbors and the way they loved themselves. Indeed, it seemed rather as if, given the way people treat each other,

they'd always loved their neighbours and the way they loved themselves, that is, with a good

deal of cruelty and disregard. After all, Lacan writes, the people who followed Christ were

not so brilliant. Lacan at this moment in his lecture is implicitly comparing Freud with Christ,

many of whose followers, in Lacan's view, had betrayed Freud's vision.

And that meant simply that they read him in the wrong way.

They had, in Lacan's view, been a failure of interpretation, a failure of literary criticism.

Criticism being notably a phrase and a practice that has had rather more staying power than the idea of literary appreciation or celebration. Literary appreciation with its peyterian associations has a whiff of the effete,

whereas criticism always implies something more determinedly intelligent and robust.

Indeed, in broaching the possibility being in some way against self-criticism, always implies something more determinedly intelligent and robust.

Indeed, in broaching the possibility being in some way against self-criticism,

we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism,

and in which the alternatives of celebration and criticism are determined and narrowing of the repertoire.

And we have to begin to imagine styles of relating in which praise and blame on the only currency,

but in which praise is preferred, in which

we praise whatever we can.

Lacone's comparison is itself a suggestive interpretation

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