1. He claims to not to want to be understood too quickly. If you believe that, you might say he's forcing the reader (or emerging psychoanalyst) to not just take his ideas as a simple list of facts to be memorized. He often rants about other fields being reductive in the face of necessary nuance. You might also justify this by saying precisely that perspective is necessary in psychoanalysis, with the human mind (particularly the suffering one) in all its unexplored complexity being its target. I'm of two minds on this: I see his point, but there are certainly times when such is an obstacle. Of course, that's if you believe him in the first place. He also said he was something of the master, and his audience the acolytes. He was trying to build a new school under his system, after all.
2. Lacan's ideas are indeed complex and extremely tightly interconnected (or polyvalent, as he likes to say). The graph of Lacanian thought has a lot of nodes (ideas), and an extremely high number of edges (relationships between ideas) per node, and thus very high graph density. If you think about it from that perspective, how does one present such a oeuvre in the linear form like essays or speeches? Further complexifying things is that he was building this in situ, his Seminars being akin to live-blogging that development. He often asks his audience if there's an expert on a particular topic and if so, to let him know about some detail. He never wrote a comprehensive final form of Lacanian thought, so any secondary texts you read will be that author's interpretation. All this creates quite the conundrum for anyone getting started.
If you want condensed info and clarity, go for a secondary source (Bruce Fink being my favorite), while noting the above. I'd also say that, like Hegel, Lacan has something of a language of his own, one you can learn. If you find his ideas compelling (I do, and have benefited from them in my personal life greatly) you should still read him as a primary source. Even if you do the actual learning via other sources, I'd assert that Lacan is one of the last of the true Renaissance men, pulling in ideas from everywhere and everywhen, and I also find reading him an expanding experience just from that perspective.
I appreciate the mention of Bruce Fink, as his name is new to me. Any works of his or others you might recommend to me would be duly noted.
Here was my early Lacan workflow: Lots of Freud essays (you need to know Freud's major ideas cold), The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan by McGowan, The Lacanian Subject by Fink, Seminar VII, Seminar XI.
I've read a lot of other stuff since then, but this path into Lacan worked for me. By the time you've read these, you'll know where to go next on your own. You'll also know pretty early in it whether Lacan is for you. Also, if you don't like Freud (and I don't mean disagree with him, but dislike the overall approach), you can safely stop there.
I've tried to listen to ŽIžek, but he sounds like nonsense to me. Like exactly what Sokal was taking the Mick out of.
Note how the author can't help but take sides on every political signifier he references. He supposedly wanted to write about the Sokal affair from his side, but the essay ends up being a polemic deeply in the now, to the degree that the documentary effort is substantively diminished. That's what papers in his field read like in the 1990s, and still do to this day.
yes, to me this is not about the Sokal affair, it's absolutely only about Gaza/Palestine, and how even Sokal itself is a hero of the cause, and how he used a way to advocate for higher standards in social science even if some thinks of this way as not ethically spotless, but everything is all right after all because they were doing politics back then (and the whole construct conundrum was already put to rest by Professor Fuss decades ago, basically right after the affair, he-he), and so on and so on, politics on the occasion of the anniversary of the affair.
that said now I'm trying to get a copy (or at least some response to) Fuss' 19 page book (!) about essentialism/anti-essentialism. sounds interesting. (really shows how academia needs to shut up when they cannot even their their own theory promulgated in their own circles, and come to some working conclusion, instead of just playing the forever armchair quarterback and vanguard at the same time.)
He was basically a cult leader. There seemed to be something going on where people are infinitely forgiving of French intellectuals (and other continental philosophers) because they are the most skilled people in the world at having infinitely complicated writing styles.
Other episodes in this series include "Althusser kills his wife and communists keep admiringly quoting him", "every 70s French intellectual signs an open letter endorsing pedophilia", and "every department at Cambridge endorses giving Derrida an honorary philosophy degree /except/ the philosophers".
I still read him because his ideas are brilliant and helped me in innumerable ways. He's dead now and his books can't hurt me. They're not even ideological, so you can't make the same case as you could for avoiding, say, a certain Austrian political theorist. However, if we somehow resurrect Lacan, I won't be lending him any first editions from my collection.
If only you hadn't put "political" there I was going to think of a joke about Wittgenstein. Who was possibly the grumpiest Austrian in the world at the time, even considering the other one.