Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's reading of Freud's writings is surprising and fascinating, and his clinical practice is radical. But the richness of his writings also derives from his recognition that psychoanalytic knowledge is derived not from the clinic alone, but from all phenomena in culture, including art. Lacan's early conceptualizations of the appearance and gaze fascinated quite a few art theorists, but the discourse of art was almost untouched by the theoretical developments of the later teaching - the shift of emphasis from language to what escapes any representation, the formulation of the mental mechanism in terms of the theory of connections and topology, a rereading of the concept of the symptom and more. In this important book, Efrat Biberman weaves an artist's work between the basic concepts of Lacan's late teaching, the discourse of art and the work of art of contemporary Israeli artists - Michal Naaman, David Ginnaton, Yehoshua Burkovsky, and Shahar Yaholum - each in the unique way in which he approaches the work of art. Along the way, surprises often glimmer in the field of art theory, such as the perception of painting not as a site of lack but as an opaque material block from which an intelligible image is carved, a structural similarity between the status of connections in Lacan's later teaching not as a reflection on the soul but as an exercise in the operation of the mental mechanism, the status of painting not as a spring of meanings but as a praxis, painting not as an object that can be iconographically embellished but as an act of rejecting meanings that demonstrates nothing but skill that repeats and breaks its peak, or painting as a symptomatic invention that collapses the tradition of representation insofar as it reveals the living flesh as much as it never stops. This is a groundbreaking book in its insights Regarding the essence of artistic practice, it is the first of its kind in the tight, clear and refreshing connection it offers between the discourse of art and Lacan's later teaching. The book helps to get out of familiar traps of iconography and ideology, and elevates the best artistic practice in Israel to the rank of a source of renewal for the way of talking about painting in general / Shirley Zisser.