Ecrits: A Selection

by Jacques Lacan, Bruce Fink (Translator)

Genius and charismatic leader of a psychoanalytic movement that in the 1950s and 1960s provided a focal point for the French intelligentsia, Jacques Lacan attracted a cult following. Ecrits is his most important work, bringing together twenty-seven articles and lectures originally published between 1936 and 1966. Following its first publication in 1966, the book gained Lacan international attention and exercised a powerful influence on contemporary intellectual life. To this day, Lacan's radical, brilliant and complex ideas continue to be highly influential in everything from film theory to art history and literary criticism. Ecrits is the essential source for anyone who seeks to understand this seminal thinker and his influence on contemporary thought and culture.

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, France

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor, who made prominent contributions to the psychoanalytic movement. His yearly seminars, conducted in Paris from 1953 until his death in 1981, were a major influence in the French intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly among post-structuralist thinkers.

Lacan's ideas centered on Freudian concepts such as the unconscious, the castration complex, the ego, focusing on identifications, and the centrality of language to subjectivity. His work was interdisciplinary, drawing on linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, amongst others. Although a controversial and divisive figure, Lacan is widely read in critical theory, literary studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy, as well as in the living practice of clinical psychoanalysis.

Reviews

[Justin]

Lacan is very difficult. Yes. We all know this. You get into him knowing this and generally either enjoy reading him or are like 'Fuck this, I'm out of here. This is nonsense,' as Alan Sokal and even apparently Richard Dawkins have done. What I think can be helpful to remember is that Lacan was writing both before there was a 'Critical Theory,' 'Cultural Studies,' 'Gender Studies,' etc. section in every bookstore and before people studying anything in the liberal arts whatsoever were being assigned Lacan to read as undergraduates. And his writing (and most of it was not produced as writing, but is transcribed lectures) is primarily aimed at psychoanalysts in training who were fluent in Freud and actively dealing in practice face to face every day with the radically different and specific discourses produced by the structures (if we accept this premise) of hysteria, psychosis, dreams, symptomatic tics, stutters, lapses - in general patterns of spoken discourse that not only border on 'madness,' as poetry is seen to often do, but are smack dab in the thick of what this term is used to designate. I think this can go a long way to make one appreciate the style, and how it might resonate with the specific day to day challenges of this practice. And also why a discourse that is seeming to occupy at least a quasi-scientific position would be written in such a bewildering, elliptical, and at times difficult manner. If 'science' really wants to engage with and understand 'madness' a certain fluency in delirious text is required for this task. And certain problems of method arise in this very endeavor. Problems that concern who gets to define reality, the unconscious of science, reason and rational discourse, among other things. Like Freud and unlike many other psychoanalysts/psychologists, I believe that Lacan is trying to meet these discourses at least half way and take them seriously as challenges to the human sciences, to received ways of interacting with other speaking subjects, and being willing to open up ethical and philosophical questions these challenges put to the analyst. When one takes a look at some of the solutions, or lack thereof, to these questions in American and British 'ego-psychology' at the time of Lacan's writing, one can appreciate his contributions even more. After reading the very excellent 'Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique' by Bruce Fink, I began to feel more oriented in Lacan's texts. Fink is a practicing analyst, unlike a lot of people who write secondary texts on Lacan from an academic literary or general 'critical studies' background, and this helped me to place Lacan's writings in their context as a non analyst myself. I think the difficulty for me is the vast array of other texts Lacan draws on and references that even someone who's read a ton of Freud, some Levi-Strauss, Saussure, etc. will have difficulty keeping up with. Generally, reading up on these has been rewarding, so if Lacan is bouncing my brain off into unfamiliar regions on scavenger hunts to figure out what the hell he's talking about, I consider that a good thing. If i read more poetry, that's what I would be asking of it. At any rate, this book might not be the best way to first approach Lacan, other than the more accessible essays like the one on the mirror stage. From what I've seen, Fink's translation is better than Sheridan's but one has to respect Sheridan's effort at being one of the first to dive into this dense Francophone tangle, and I managed to read this translation and get enough out of it to keep giving Lacan a go. I think one thing I can say is that the critics of Lacan that seem the most valuable and interesting to me (Deleuze, Guattari, Irigaray, Baudrillard, Mitchell, etc.) have all come from a place of having spent some time with and absorbed many of his ideas or even having been students of his, rather than simply able to dismiss him, and this is a good indication of his ongoing relevance to me. I enjoy following his writing develop over the decades of his seminars and he seems to have been willing to modify and expand his open-ended thinking enough to avoid ever having been stagnant. I wish there was more available in English of his later writings on the Borromean knot and the "sinthome." I would definitely recommend spending some time with some of his shorter writings on Kant, Sade, ethics, the differences and links between the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary orders or registers, and the mirror stage at least as a prelude to a more sustained reading, and secondary texts like Fink, Lecerlce, Zupancic, and Zizek go a long way. I'm sure I will eventually read everything by Lacan available in English translation. Can't say this about most authors.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An updated review following a second reading:

Although this book includes some of Lacan's greatest hits, including "The Mirror Stage" and "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," I would not recommend it if you want an overview of the French psychoanalyst's thought. At one-third the length of the full text of his Écrits, this book is just the tip of a much larger iceberg. Included in the Ecrits, for instance, are several essays in which Lacan develops his "graph of desire"; included in Ecrits: A Selection, however, is only the last of these, in which Lacan adds another layer of complexity to the graph while assuming that his reader is already familiar with his earlier work on the subject.

Am I saying one should read the full Ecrits instead of this shorter selection? Not exactly. I suppose if you really want to study Lacan (or enjoy his writing, which is an entire subject that could be discussed on its own), then yes you would want to read Ecrits, as well as his other books--it may be the case that understanding much of his thought requires your becoming familiar with all of it (as well as with much of Freud and a number of other psychoanalysts to whom Lacan frequently makes reference). Personally, I would rather read Slavoj Žižek's commentaries on Lacan's thought than read Lacan himself.

It is an interesting experience, though. With many of these essays, I found as I finished reading each that I felt like I knew less about Lacan's thought than when I began. Of course, there may be other readers more familiar with the references to psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Saussurean linguistics, and more determined to find their way through the obfuscations and mystifications of Lacan's convoluted grammar and thought, who will get more out of these essays than I did. (In this case, especially since Lacan sometimes employs word play, the lucky ones are those who are able to read him in the original French. I just continue to remind myself that we poor English readers are able to read Shakespeare and Joyce in the language in which they wrote their respective works).

So, certainly, Ecrits: A Selection is a great way to get a sense of Lacan's thought and writing, and if you're already knowledgeable particularly with regard to Freudian thought, you'll probably find a lot of interest here (one subject that comes up often is transference). But it is rather advanced, with a lot of specialized terminology and references to complex concepts for which Lacan rarely supplies definitions (perhaps one would find these in the aforementioned Ecrits).

Acquired Jul 9, 1999
Brown Bag Bookshop, Rochester NY

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

My Post-Modern Lit professor tried to convince me that Lacan wrote in confusing circles and metaphors on purpose to weed out stupid people, but I'm not buying it. This guy may have been an influential genius or whatever, but he was totally shit at writing.

[Veronika · Rating 2 out of 5]

blee blee bloo bloo, "general state of the world is interpersonal union of collective consciousness, ego is just a disease and an anomaly + it apparently only arises in humans" "invention of mirrors partially caused the disease that is ego" "language and other symbolism in general is our attempt at navigating the world while having the disease that is ego" "i hate anna freud" ...

[Berend Vendel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only readable if you're already in the locus of psychoanalysis. And even then.... But is that not the point? To listen where the signifiers rumble, and not get alienated in the imaginary?

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like I understand less of Lacan than when I started. I also get the sense that they situation would please, or at least amuse, the author himself.

[Alex Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here Lacan dazzles us with his ramblings. I suppose in some way there is very little clarity he can achieve due to constraints of language. But here he highlights strongly how consciousness and mind self develop from social selection and from bodily "cuts" that interrupt and force us to find coherence in abstraction. The final formulation for the self seems to be on the plateau of logical resonance, when one is able to comprehend and endlessly defer that empty lack that sutures our sense of person and the sense of others.

What makes some of this difficult is that this selection kind of starts in the middle; there is no easy introduction here, you are assumed to know the basics. For that reason, I would have liked the very excellent last essay to be one of the first.

[Savaş · Rating 3 out of 5]

This selection/translation is an old and limited one although the articles to be translated in English were selected by Lacan. The new Fink translation covers all of the Écrits. Reading Lacan is not fun. Now if you really want to torture yourself, you better start with Seminars... not Écrits! There is approximately one Seminar for each article in Écrits.

[Христо · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fundamental work; something to be re-read multiple times. Notorious to read, even and especially in translation, due to how much Lacan loves word-plays but also his almost obscure style. I found the work extremely important for Epistemology and even Metaphysics, but naturally also for the field of Linguistics. Can't recommend enough to those who have an idea _why_ they would want to read Lacan.

[meredith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stockholm Syndrome: the reason this book garnered any stars at all.

[Brendan · Rating 4 out of 5]

nearly impossible to decipher but what i can get out of it is fantastic. he aims for nothing more than a topography of consciousness. and, amazingly, succeeds.

[c h r i s · Rating 3 out of 5]

L1 For the critique of the critique of the Science of History

History as musical “rhythm”! All form no content:

“It suffices to say in passing that in psychoanalysis, history constitutes a different dimension than development—and it is an aberration to try to reduce it to the latter. History unfolds only in going against the rhythm of development—a point from which history as a science should perhaps learn a lesson [!!!], if it expects to escape the ever-present clutches of a providential conception of its course.” (J. Lacan, Science and Truth 1965-66, in: Écrits, p.743, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006)

Let us “perhaps” learn a lesson. With Marx and Engels, the opposite, the content gives rise to form:

“historical conditions […] may appear as natural prerequisite of production for any one period [or may turn out as] its historical result of another.” (K. Marx, Preface and Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859, p.27, FLP, Peking, 1976)

The content of history corresponds to the destruction and development of the productive forces and their relations:

“the economic facts […] have so far played no role or only a contemptible one in the writing of history, are, at least in the modern world, a decisive historical force […] they form the basis of the origination of the present-day class antagonisms […] these class antagonisms, in the countries where they have become fully developed, thanks to large-scale industry, hence especially in England, are in their turn the basis of the formation of political parties and of party struggles, and thus of all political history [….] generally, it is not the state which conditions and regulates civil society, but civil society which conditions and regulates the state, and, consequently, that politics and its history are to be explained from the economic relations and their development, and not vice versa [….] This discovery, which revolutionized the science of history […] was, however, of immediate importance for the contemporary workers’ movement. Communism […] now no longer appeared as something accidental which could just as well not have occurred. These movements now presented themselves as a movement of […] the proletariat, as the more or less developed forms of its historically necessary struggle against the ruling class, the bourgeoisie; as forms of the class struggle […] communism now no longer meant the concoction, by means of the imagination, of an ideal society as perfect as possible, but insight into the nature, the conditions and the consequent general aims of the struggle waged by the proletariat. Now, we were by no means of the opinion that the new scientific results should be confided in large tomes exclusively to the ‘learned’ world. Quite the contrary…” (F. Engels, On the History of the Communist League 1885, in: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, p.173-4, FLP, Peking, 1977)

It is the school of labour (not the university), which is the content of the science of history. The science of history is not an absolute method standing above the content, but a direct derivative of the content. There is also “history” on its own as only “content” with no form, accumulating facts:

“When all is said and done, the ‘method’ of the Hegelian Scientist consists in having no method or way of thinking peculiar to his Science [….] The Wise Man [….] His role is that of a perfectly flat and indefinitely extended mirror: he does not reflect on the Real; it is the Real that reflects itself on him, is reflected in his consciousness, and is revealed in its own dialectical structure by the discourse of the Wise Man who describes it without deforming it […] Hegel looks at the Real and describes what he sees, everything that he sees, and nothing bur what he sees. (A. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, p.176, Cornell University Press, 1980)

In the above way, there is no need for a 1000 page methodological introduction, observe reality, and write it down in its contradictions. “Science” itself, on its own, is frequently mistaken as a typical absolute “method” standing above the content:

“experimental science involves on the one hand the observation of phenomena, on the other hand also the discovery of the Law, the essential being, the hidden force that causes those phenomena — thus reducing the data supplied by observation to their simple principles.” (G W F Hegel, The Philosophy of History 1822, p.439, Prometheus, 1991)

Mathematicians can schematize the economic logic history with nice fine mathematical forms, to then engage in forecasting. This math can ascend beyond the material into ideal. Still, matter is prior, and gives rise to the mathematical constructs of our mind. Hegel (the materialist) writes:

“To be sure, the whole of mathematics must not be considered as purely ideal or formal, but as at the same time real and physical” (G W F Hegel, On the Orbits of the Planets 1801, in: Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal Volume 12, No. 1 & 2, p.281, 1987)

_____________________

Materialized language taken as absolute (indifferent) form:

“In the course of their work on ancient writings and sacred books, philologists came into contact with a great many languages. Reading the RigVeda and Avesta, they discovered that ancient Hindu and Persian words were astonishingly similar to words in the Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Lithuanian, Russian and other languages, in short almost all European languages, including Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. The similarity of words and roots was not accidental. It showed the ancient kinship of the languages that became known as the Indo-European family. The discovery laid the foundation of a new science, historical and comparative linguistics. Furthermore, this discovery proved just as important to the science of history. It showed that not only texts but language itself its grammar and, particularly, vocabulary, can be an excellent historical source” (A. Kondratov, The Riddles of Three Oceans, p.8, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1974)

But there is a nuance (supposed lack of difference):

“the very society that wished to restore, along with the privileges of the producer, the causal hierarchy of the relations between production and the ideological superstructure to their full political rights, has nonetheless failed [abject failure!!!] to give birth to an Esperanto [well known aim of the October revolution] in which the relations of language to socialist realities would have rendered any literary formalism radically impossible.” (J. Lacan, The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud 1957, in: Écrits A Selection, p.148, Tavistock Publications, 1982)

The Soviets did not conform to the schemes Lacan foisted on them, shocking!

“language […] it is so irreducible to a superstructure than materialism itself is seen to be alarmed [alarm!!!] by this heresy – see Stalin” (J. Lacan, The Freudian Thing 1956, in: Ibid, p.125)

Yes let us assert Stalin in the positive, not the negative:

“the various social groups, the classes, are far from being indifferent to language. They strive to utilize the language in their own interests, to impose their own special lingo, their own special terms, their own special expressions upon it. The upper strata of the propertied classes, who have divorced themselves from and detest the people - the aristocratic nobility, the upper strata of the bourgeoisie -- particularly distinguish themselves in this respect. ‘Class’ dialects, jargons, high-society ‘languages’” (J. V. Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics 1950, p.11, FLP, Peking, 1976)

So, in societies with a lower level of economic development, the bourgeois classes are basically forced by their perception of the forces of nature being all-powerful, to stay inside and interminably deliberate over the outside world as an unknowable “thing-in-itself”, idealistically trying to deduce the outside world, the conclusion for which is not in their thoughts, further alienating themselves from the world.

“One of the most difficult tasks confronting philosophers is to descend from the world of thought to the actual world. Language is the immediate actuality of thought. Just as philosophers have given thought an independent existence, so they were bound to make language into an independent realm. This is the secret of philosophical language, in which thoughts in the form of words have their own content. The problem of descending from the world of thoughts to the actual world is turned into the problem of descending from language to life.” (K. Marx, F. Engels, The German Ideology 1845-6, p. 472-473, Prometheus, 1998)
“the whole problem of the transition from thought to reality, hence from language to life, exists only in philosophical illusion, i.e., it is justified only for philosophical consciousness, which cannot possibly be clear about the nature and origin of its apparent separation from life [….] The emptiest, shallowest brain among the philosophers had to ‘end’ philosophy by proclaiming his lack of thought to be the end of philosophy and thus the triumphant entry into ‘corporeal’ life. His philosophising mental vacuity was already in itself the end of philosophy just as his unspeakable language was the end of all language.” (K. Marx, F. Engels, Ibid, p. 475-476)

For alienated being, philosophy is over, and mystical obscurantist nonsense language begins.

[Sam Eccleston · Rating 2 out of 5]

The thing about Lacan is that, in the hands of an able interpreter or disciple, his thought is fascinatingly provocative (whether or not anything he says is true is another matter best left aside). Sadly, his own writings are nothing short of a tragedy; layers upon layers of grammatically convoluted mystification to which no definite, or in many cases approximate, meaning can be pinned. Ironically for someone so interested in grammar, rhetoric, and linguistics, his own grammar is appalling- every sentence is constructed chiefly of unreferenced pronouns, undefined neologisms, and baroque clausal arrangements which render page after page of his works devoid of any real content. Thus, this is not the typical case of a jargon-rich discourse becoming impenetrable to the uninitiated; many of his sentences are literal nonsense- fragmentary and dis-articulated from the surrounding prose.

One wonders, having waded through the mire in which he chooses to float his ideas, whether in fact his able interpreters, Zizek chief among them, are interpreters at all, or whether in fact his is a name upon which new and original theories with little resemblance to his own (whatever that was) are hung as a kind foundational patriarch, helpfully occluded by the mists, not of time, but of his own writings.

One cannot help but discern something deeply self-serving in all of this; whether it is the defensive sleight of hand that protects Lacan from criticism by hiding all of his substantive argument in nonsense and misdirection; the posturing and an egotist who feels that the degree to which he is misunderstood is a testament to the profundity of his thought; or just the carelessness of someone unconcerned about their audience, it is thoroughly disappointing.

[Mathias · Rating 1 out of 5]

My Preliminary judgement is that the rethoric of Lacan is arbitrary and incoherent, albeit perhaps in some ways circling some or other true intuition. it remains to be seen if there are any noteworthy insights

As the reading is resumed, I am increasingly getting triggered by the snobbery, it strikes me as hypomanic rambling about freudian psychoanalysis

My final judgement is that this work is poor in its thinking, rethorical structure, language, use of arbitrary references.

To me it is just jibberish, like a poor quality rationalistic (and therefore a socially acceptable level of functioning) imitation of a creative psychotic person but without any authentic relatable descriptions. It feels like a rationalistic attempt to imitate the authenticity of psychotic poetic language as a way to achieve insight into the human condition - but it never succeeds, the author is trapped in his rationalistic freudian terminology without having achieved any wisdom or poetic intuition. Brute noise in the pauline sense (language without the authenticity of love)

[Booksen]

Out of all the psychoanalysts I ever had to study (and I had to study a lot of them), Lacan is by far the one I disliked the most. His theories were whatever Freud once said, but made incredibly dull and even more misogynistic. On top of that, people may try to tell you he wrote in a ridiculously confusing and complicated manner in purpose, but what's probably true is that he was just bad at it. Everything reads as a confusing mess because it is.

If you ever wanna read something written by a psychoanalyst, just pick up Freud. Even if most, though not all of his theories are no longer valid, at least he wrote them in a straight up entertaining manner (many of them read as if he was just telling you a story), and his prose is actually pretty great.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lacan is very concerned with psychoanalytic practice, which is uninteresting to me, and also spends much time engaging with his contemporaries, some of whom have faded into obscurity (Melanie Klein was the one reference point I relate to). I would think, in the abstract, his style of winding psychoanalytic observations amidst literary and philosophical references would be appealing to me but it didn't click at all, instead coming off as unfocused. There were a couple stellar essays but I find the first one, on the Mirror Stage, the most telling: Lacan meanders oddly about while barely touching the concept itself. Overall, I greatly enjoy engaging with his concepts elsewhere, like in Zizek, but the source material isn't worth it.

[Matt Sautman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lacan has been on my radar for a long time. As a scholar who works largely with queer theory and counter-hegemonic discourses, so much of my scholarship and the scholarship I work with builds on Lacan’s ideas, but outside of studies in a classroom setting, I never managed to set aside the time to read through the entirety of one of his books. While I recognize this version is an incomplete version of the larger Ecrits text, I find so much of this book compelling in a way that I had not experienced in quite some time, as I found myself reflecting more on the nature of signifiers, their relationship to identify formation, and how Lacan’s influence permeates throughout the work of so many scholars I admire.

[Doug Snyder]

you is not a signal, but a reference to the other -- it is order and love. the end point of the dialectic [is] existential recognition: you are this. . . between rational knowledge and unconscious desire.

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Mirror Stage"

[Janice]

Haunted.

[Liam Creaser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank god that's over
Why does he have to write Like That
Main takeaways:
desire / lack is absolute
"Man cannot aim at being whole"
idk some stuff about signifiers

[غبار · Rating 3 out of 5]

"It is the truth of what this desire has been in his history that the patient cries out through the symptom ..."

—Agency of the letter in the unconscious, p167

[Jared]

Read most, dip in and out across term.

[Naja]

am

[Robb Seaton · Rating 1 out of 5]

Went on a first date with a therapist into Lacanian psychoanalysis and she gifted me this. One star because I mostly bounced off the translation (too literal?). Plus, she ghosted me.

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's worth saying that even in this book, an excerpted version of the original, I only poked around and read those essays that seemed most interesting, most relevant to me.

That said, I really liked it, and found it to be pretty lucid. It's true, there are places that are sort of impenetrable, but most of those I think concerned people that Lacan was correcting or responding to, and so when I didn't totally follow the grounds of his disagreement, I don't feel like it prevented me from understanding what Lacan was trying to say.

The notes were really helpful, as was the supplemental material, where key ideas are indexed in a way that allows you to see them develop, etc. Really, a very helpful little selection.

[Tony Poerio · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Lacan. But his work is the densest, most difficult I've ever read, in any subject. At least in memory. Maybe that's because I was in college, less patient, or some other factor--but he's tough to wade through, even though some of his ideas are fantastic. Still, I've suffered through books on Turing Machines and Incompleteness Theorems that were easier. In any case, Lacan's thought lives on, and will for a long time. Zizek, and many others are huge fans. He's consistently evangelized, and honestly I think that's a good thing, because he's got a lot to say. It just helps to have someone else unpack it and summarize sometimes.

[Bryce]

This is seminal French psychoanylitic theory (that carries on Freud's work in a sense) outlining an interpretive matrix for the general philosophical question of subjectivity. Lacan's insights are applicable to a variety of disciplines within the humanities. In my infinite stupidity I bought the book without realizing that it wasn't a translation of the complete work; I'm a little annoyed by that oversight, but will read it nonetheless and will go on to get a copy of the complete translation if I like this one.

[Lorraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lacan's great, but the translation by Fink is a bit problematic I feel (he uses "reality" instead of "the real" and though he justifies this, it perturbs me... Still, a good read, if obtuse (I mean, it's Lacan!). I think that it'll read better in French... but I don't know any French... Here's what I did: read the essays as and when you want, separately... easier to get through...

[Perrystroika · Rating 1 out of 5]

By reputation, Lacan's writings are somewhat impenetrable. It's his seminars where he is most clear and most lucid. This translations, which I have, is also questionable. There is a newer one available, making this early, valiant effort, obsolete.