What do you think?
Rate this book
Ecrits
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.
Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1966
382 people are currently reading
10878 people want to read
About the author
Jacques Lacan
186 books1,236 followersJacques-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.
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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 131 reviews
Want to read
January 30, 2013I marked this "to-read" but that might not be an honest assessment of my intentions. So I'm creating a new shelf. "To-poke-at-with-a-stick".
May 14, 2011
Don't let anyone tell you they know what the f-ck is going on in this book. Its the craziest thing of all time. And to think, he was doing therapy analyzing people's sanity when in fact, one glance at this text will reveal Lacan himself is batshit crazy, I mean like hanging from the chandelier without any pants on, out of his gourd crazy. Zizek loves this guy way too much - and I highly doubt Lacan ever slept. He apparently has read every single book in existence because he footnotes everything. Its like an encyclopedia brittanica, and intertextual cornucopia of erudition. And all for not...man, sometimes I wonder if I had not kids, no family, could I read as much as Lacan, then I realize, what would be the use of that? This should be called the Necromicon (an HP Lovecraft reference meaning a book no one has ever read impossible to decipher the text but it contains the secret meaning of all of existence).
September 26, 2007
Lacan isn't an easy read. If you're interested in learning about Lacan's ideas, it's probably a much better idea to start with something like Zizek's How to Read Lacan, which will give you the concepts without Lacan's sadistic writing style.
But, I find something compelling with Lacan's writing, infuriating as it is. Lacan spent a lot of time writing about the disparity between what we perceive as reality or knowledge and what is "actually" there (or, perhaps more accurately, the way language limits our understanding), and as I sat there, reading and re-reading (and re-reading) each passage, I became increasingly frustrated by the text. Why was this so hard? These were just words in a language I've been speaking for as long as I've been speaking in a language, so there was no reason it should be so hard. And then it occurred to me that I was experiencing the exact kind of disparity between understanding and perception that Lacan was describing (kind of like the organic reading experience Mark Z. Danielewski creates with his excellent House of Leaves. It was a rough lesson, but one that I was ultimately glad to have.
But, I find something compelling with Lacan's writing, infuriating as it is. Lacan spent a lot of time writing about the disparity between what we perceive as reality or knowledge and what is "actually" there (or, perhaps more accurately, the way language limits our understanding), and as I sat there, reading and re-reading (and re-reading) each passage, I became increasingly frustrated by the text. Why was this so hard? These were just words in a language I've been speaking for as long as I've been speaking in a language, so there was no reason it should be so hard. And then it occurred to me that I was experiencing the exact kind of disparity between understanding and perception that Lacan was describing (kind of like the organic reading experience Mark Z. Danielewski creates with his excellent House of Leaves. It was a rough lesson, but one that I was ultimately glad to have.
December 19, 2007
Some dumb book by a French guy.
August 17, 2021
You, Goodreader, should know I’m not a scholar; my stature does not depend on publishing a defense or rebuttal of so-and-so’s perishable rendition of this-or-that. I have no academic training, no degrees, no guidance and no constraints. I just read. Pretty soon I hope I’ll be good at it.
Forget How-To—Why read Lacan? Because you are interested, in fact it’s in your best interest. If you read with disinterest there will be no Thing to attract meaning, and knowledge will foreclose truth, vaingloriously withering into the impotent violence of reasoning without reason. It concerns you, even if you don’t believe it. If you’ve read Lacan you will hear the ventriloquist’s echo here.
Knowledge is an act caused by truth. “You” are involved, inextricable but not ineffable, not a silent or innocent bystander. Dialectical philosophy and psychoanalysis will make it more difficult for this to be ignored, eluded, forgotten, denied, repressed. Lacan provides an object (Objekt) to stimulate the source (Quelle) by which to take one’s aim (Ziel) on the highway of despair upon which we are thrust (Drang) and which must be traversed, elliptically lured by the goal of subjective destitution. That is, if you bring the drive.
“Driving” is not the least apt descriptor for Lacan’s language. It is a grudging attempt to fixate perpetual motion. Every sentence, every graph, every topology presents dynamism. The last thing Lacan wanted to do was impart a catechism by which the fearful and faithful could be mollified. His speech and writing embody the paradox of limitless hubris and self-effacing humility: the audacious rhetorical gymnastics are not those of the desiring-worm “Lacan” but rather “they don’t speak to a particular person, they just speak… a la cantonade,” to nobody in particular, to the company at large. (S XI, 16.2)
“For, as I have said, without going into the mainspring of transference, it is ultimately the analyst’s desire that operates in psychoanalysis.
The style of a philosophical conference inclines everyone, so it seems, to highlight instead his own impermeability.
I am no more unable to do so than the next person, but in the field of psychoanalytic training, the displacement process makes teaching cacophonous.”
Lacan himself tells you in countless scattered coded messages why he must gambol with language as he must. And he must. You either understand that Lacan is talking to and about you or you don’t bother. A half-assed approach exposes a complete ass, languishing and lost, looking for shortcuts on a lifelong Via Dolorosa leading back to the beginning, but this time understood as the anticipated beginning. There is no such thing as veridical comprehension, an Absolute Knowledge of “Lacanianism” as hackneyed as Lacan’s own misreading of Hegel’s master trope. Don’t take me or Zizek at our word, do it yourself: keep your face smashed for years between the Phenomenology and the Greater Logic and the Seminars and Ecrits, maybe salved with Capital and Traumdeutung, and see if the practice and technique of psychoanalytic experience do not provide the pulse and pulsion to the theory and notion of Absolute Knowledge. NEWS: Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan. Pretty encompassing.
“Now one can be a bit shaky at this junction, that is how beauty walks, but one has to shake it just right.”
Ecrits is a significant element in a rebus densely knotted with the personal, professional, philosophical, and world historical. It—and anything else aspiring to the truth of human experience—is not an ideogram, a commanding sign decipherable at a glance and just as soon out of mind. Lacan’s teaching began with an analysis of the structure of paranoiac knowledge, and his trajectory stayed the course: everything is connected. Fantasy, the phallus, desire, objet petit a, identification, drive, obsession, aggression, the paternal metaphor, RSI-RIS-SIR-SRI-IRS-ISR… nothing can be satisfyingly defined because nothing escapes the desire for definition.
“The progress of knowledge can bear…no fascination with definitions.”
You can read “The Subversion of the Subject” repeatedly (I did, do, and will) yet the cornerstone for the provisional edifice of your understanding might be secreted in a distant footnote or anecdote. A concept, function, or structure is likely to be enlisted without comment or explanation at any moment; what appears senseless, baffling, and whimsical “charlatanry” is—and only IS —meaningful (read: glistening with signifierness) in articulation with a pliant structure. Such is the psychoanalytic contribution to the secondary elaboration of the relations between particulars and universals, at once the network of language and the subject caught therein.
(Chrono-)Logically speaking, I have passed the moment for concluding a first and thorough reading, yet the time for comprehending will linger as long as I do. I must be perverse because I find that reading Lacan makes lingering and longing with life a calmer, clearer experience. His lessons still the waters I’ve struck upon dis-covering my image. Like the incorrigible narcissist we all are, I read Lacan and all I got was a lousy letter to myself. Someone—the perfect vanishing mediator between Hegel and Lacan, far better fitting than Kojeve—Lacan loves to quote, and whom like Lacan it is impossible to quote well, said it best a while before him:
“I look at myself and see myself as an angel! and I die, and I yearn”
Such is life.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Yes, I read the entire Ecrits again, after reading Seminars I-XI, which took 3+ years. I'm a mortal human being of average intelligence. It is best to already know what he's talking about, second best to want to, or least worse to keep trying. The attention to detail is astonishing: I noticed only 2 typographical errors. Imagine a room filled with Marxist-Hegelian-Continental furniture; now imagine it all upside down and inside out. That is what has happened to my brain. I know (cuz I desire to know) how it stands up, what it's made of, and how it supports me. The thoroughgoing reorientation of the relations between subjectivity, truth, meaning, knowledge, desire, science, and discourse is singular and peerless. Maybe I'm a better person, maybe not, doesn't matter, I'm very glad I put myself through it all, otherwise I would have never discovered such demanding enjoyments. Not all failure is sublime but there is no sublimity without failure. Thanks, Doc, I owe you a brand new nothing. You took the words right out of my mouth and when I got them back they were just more of the same but sounded so different I could hardly speak. I wonder what voice I will find in the next 12 Seminars.
Forget How-To—Why read Lacan? Because you are interested, in fact it’s in your best interest. If you read with disinterest there will be no Thing to attract meaning, and knowledge will foreclose truth, vaingloriously withering into the impotent violence of reasoning without reason. It concerns you, even if you don’t believe it. If you’ve read Lacan you will hear the ventriloquist’s echo here.
Knowledge is an act caused by truth. “You” are involved, inextricable but not ineffable, not a silent or innocent bystander. Dialectical philosophy and psychoanalysis will make it more difficult for this to be ignored, eluded, forgotten, denied, repressed. Lacan provides an object (Objekt) to stimulate the source (Quelle) by which to take one’s aim (Ziel) on the highway of despair upon which we are thrust (Drang) and which must be traversed, elliptically lured by the goal of subjective destitution. That is, if you bring the drive.
“Driving” is not the least apt descriptor for Lacan’s language. It is a grudging attempt to fixate perpetual motion. Every sentence, every graph, every topology presents dynamism. The last thing Lacan wanted to do was impart a catechism by which the fearful and faithful could be mollified. His speech and writing embody the paradox of limitless hubris and self-effacing humility: the audacious rhetorical gymnastics are not those of the desiring-worm “Lacan” but rather “they don’t speak to a particular person, they just speak… a la cantonade,” to nobody in particular, to the company at large. (S XI, 16.2)
“For, as I have said, without going into the mainspring of transference, it is ultimately the analyst’s desire that operates in psychoanalysis.
The style of a philosophical conference inclines everyone, so it seems, to highlight instead his own impermeability.
I am no more unable to do so than the next person, but in the field of psychoanalytic training, the displacement process makes teaching cacophonous.”
Lacan himself tells you in countless scattered coded messages why he must gambol with language as he must. And he must. You either understand that Lacan is talking to and about you or you don’t bother. A half-assed approach exposes a complete ass, languishing and lost, looking for shortcuts on a lifelong Via Dolorosa leading back to the beginning, but this time understood as the anticipated beginning. There is no such thing as veridical comprehension, an Absolute Knowledge of “Lacanianism” as hackneyed as Lacan’s own misreading of Hegel’s master trope. Don’t take me or Zizek at our word, do it yourself: keep your face smashed for years between the Phenomenology and the Greater Logic and the Seminars and Ecrits, maybe salved with Capital and Traumdeutung, and see if the practice and technique of psychoanalytic experience do not provide the pulse and pulsion to the theory and notion of Absolute Knowledge. NEWS: Hegel, Marx, Freud, Lacan. Pretty encompassing.
“Now one can be a bit shaky at this junction, that is how beauty walks, but one has to shake it just right.”
Ecrits is a significant element in a rebus densely knotted with the personal, professional, philosophical, and world historical. It—and anything else aspiring to the truth of human experience—is not an ideogram, a commanding sign decipherable at a glance and just as soon out of mind. Lacan’s teaching began with an analysis of the structure of paranoiac knowledge, and his trajectory stayed the course: everything is connected. Fantasy, the phallus, desire, objet petit a, identification, drive, obsession, aggression, the paternal metaphor, RSI-RIS-SIR-SRI-IRS-ISR… nothing can be satisfyingly defined because nothing escapes the desire for definition.
“The progress of knowledge can bear…no fascination with definitions.”
You can read “The Subversion of the Subject” repeatedly (I did, do, and will) yet the cornerstone for the provisional edifice of your understanding might be secreted in a distant footnote or anecdote. A concept, function, or structure is likely to be enlisted without comment or explanation at any moment; what appears senseless, baffling, and whimsical “charlatanry” is—and only IS —meaningful (read: glistening with signifierness) in articulation with a pliant structure. Such is the psychoanalytic contribution to the secondary elaboration of the relations between particulars and universals, at once the network of language and the subject caught therein.
(Chrono-)Logically speaking, I have passed the moment for concluding a first and thorough reading, yet the time for comprehending will linger as long as I do. I must be perverse because I find that reading Lacan makes lingering and longing with life a calmer, clearer experience. His lessons still the waters I’ve struck upon dis-covering my image. Like the incorrigible narcissist we all are, I read Lacan and all I got was a lousy letter to myself. Someone—the perfect vanishing mediator between Hegel and Lacan, far better fitting than Kojeve—Lacan loves to quote, and whom like Lacan it is impossible to quote well, said it best a while before him:
“I look at myself and see myself as an angel! and I die, and I yearn”
Such is life.
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Yes, I read the entire Ecrits again, after reading Seminars I-XI, which took 3+ years. I'm a mortal human being of average intelligence. It is best to already know what he's talking about, second best to want to, or least worse to keep trying. The attention to detail is astonishing: I noticed only 2 typographical errors. Imagine a room filled with Marxist-Hegelian-Continental furniture; now imagine it all upside down and inside out. That is what has happened to my brain. I know (cuz I desire to know) how it stands up, what it's made of, and how it supports me. The thoroughgoing reorientation of the relations between subjectivity, truth, meaning, knowledge, desire, science, and discourse is singular and peerless. Maybe I'm a better person, maybe not, doesn't matter, I'm very glad I put myself through it all, otherwise I would have never discovered such demanding enjoyments. Not all failure is sublime but there is no sublimity without failure. Thanks, Doc, I owe you a brand new nothing. You took the words right out of my mouth and when I got them back they were just more of the same but sounded so different I could hardly speak. I wonder what voice I will find in the next 12 Seminars.
September 23, 2008
It's strange, but for me very true, that the best poetry I've ever read postures itself not as poetry but as psychoanalysis, positioned in a kind of wierd overlapped space shared by literature, science, art, history, philosophy, and pyschoanalysis - one of the first truely interdisciplinary schools of thought.
February 10, 2022
The key to deciphering these essays are to realize that Lacan thinks psychoanalysis is real and is instrumental in understanding the difference without a concept and he sincerely believes in the fundamental truth of psychoanalysis that the truth is hidden from us within our unconsciousness that gets convoluted by our desires of our desires which come about through the desires that the Other have for us through alienation. Hegel's alienation and master/slave is fundamental for Lacan.
The Purloined Letter essay clearly expounds what Lacan wants to say in all of the following essays. Yes, this book is a series of essays overall and they don’t always cohere between essays, but there are themes that run through the essays since they represent Lacan’s life project and there are helpful redundancies and repetition between the essays that explain things that came before in different terms.
The complexity comes about only when Lacan changes his view point over time as one probably should over time as one learns more about life and processes their own experiences. The real, the imaginary and the signified become less orthogonal for him over time.
Yes, there are absurdities that get convoluted beyond recognition as he takes his axioms to explain reality. His take on homosexuals, trans-people, and autistics belongs in the realm of non-sense. He’ll say something to the effect that the neurosis brought about by the paranoia leading to delusions of the psychosis since the patient’s mother’s phallic symbol was inadequate leading to latent homosexual tendencies that are best analyzed in order to heal the patient. Now, for Lacan this will all make sense since the absence of the presence (the phallic is not necessarily something tangible it is also the presence of the absence) is the real since for him the unconscious is the ultimate symbol of symbols that exist and it is the role of the analyst to diagnose repressed problems.
Lacan does write with wit. He’ll say something like we all have neurosis because we all have repressions of our unconsciousness is not tautological, but, rather, is total-logical (a neologism) because we must understand the whole before we can understand the parts. For Lacan the unconscious is the only real thing but is not knowable and everything else is not real and getting at that one real thing is the role of the proper Freudian analyst as proposed by Lacan.
The translator said something to the effect that the essays (lectures) are difficult in the beginning and the endings are muddled and the reader should focus on the middle parts, the graphic comic book on Lacan (Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide) said Lacan is noted for his difficulty and most reviews said Lacan is too difficult. Don’t fall into the trap of not realizing that Lacan is a psychoanalyst and believes what he is saying. Everything flows as part of a masterful life-project when you realize that Lacan is a psychoanalyst and thinks that almost all other psychoanalysts are doing it wrong and the current crop of newly trained analyst are suspect.
Talking therapy (psychoanalysis) is superfluous for psychotics and Lacan thinks otherwise. Lacan thinks the unconscious is the key that unlocks everything and that non-reflection is its pathway and that realization can lead to a start of health for the patient or larger paychecks for the analyst (Lacan, does have a sense of humor and it shows in these essays). Lacan thinks Descartes’ cogitio is the pathway to truth if it can be unveiled through dream analysis, free association, talking therapy and so on, but I want to comment that Descartes assumes a world away to get cogito ergo sum, and I live in a world that seems to exist outside of myself. Lacan wants to reconcile the outside of us with the inside of us through magic.
I read Deleuze before I read this book. I wish I had read this book first. Deleuze plays the game just as seriously as Lacan does but Deleuze wisely takes the conclusions to their absurdness that Lacan is not willing to take them, but Lacan lays the groundwork. Lacan mentioned several times ‘Kierkegaard’s repetition’, and that would be what Deleuze means by ‘difference without a concept’, that’s why my first paragraph had that phrase in it.
The Purloined Letter essay clearly expounds what Lacan wants to say in all of the following essays. Yes, this book is a series of essays overall and they don’t always cohere between essays, but there are themes that run through the essays since they represent Lacan’s life project and there are helpful redundancies and repetition between the essays that explain things that came before in different terms.
The complexity comes about only when Lacan changes his view point over time as one probably should over time as one learns more about life and processes their own experiences. The real, the imaginary and the signified become less orthogonal for him over time.
Yes, there are absurdities that get convoluted beyond recognition as he takes his axioms to explain reality. His take on homosexuals, trans-people, and autistics belongs in the realm of non-sense. He’ll say something to the effect that the neurosis brought about by the paranoia leading to delusions of the psychosis since the patient’s mother’s phallic symbol was inadequate leading to latent homosexual tendencies that are best analyzed in order to heal the patient. Now, for Lacan this will all make sense since the absence of the presence (the phallic is not necessarily something tangible it is also the presence of the absence) is the real since for him the unconscious is the ultimate symbol of symbols that exist and it is the role of the analyst to diagnose repressed problems.
Lacan does write with wit. He’ll say something like we all have neurosis because we all have repressions of our unconsciousness is not tautological, but, rather, is total-logical (a neologism) because we must understand the whole before we can understand the parts. For Lacan the unconscious is the only real thing but is not knowable and everything else is not real and getting at that one real thing is the role of the proper Freudian analyst as proposed by Lacan.
The translator said something to the effect that the essays (lectures) are difficult in the beginning and the endings are muddled and the reader should focus on the middle parts, the graphic comic book on Lacan (Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide) said Lacan is noted for his difficulty and most reviews said Lacan is too difficult. Don’t fall into the trap of not realizing that Lacan is a psychoanalyst and believes what he is saying. Everything flows as part of a masterful life-project when you realize that Lacan is a psychoanalyst and thinks that almost all other psychoanalysts are doing it wrong and the current crop of newly trained analyst are suspect.
Talking therapy (psychoanalysis) is superfluous for psychotics and Lacan thinks otherwise. Lacan thinks the unconscious is the key that unlocks everything and that non-reflection is its pathway and that realization can lead to a start of health for the patient or larger paychecks for the analyst (Lacan, does have a sense of humor and it shows in these essays). Lacan thinks Descartes’ cogitio is the pathway to truth if it can be unveiled through dream analysis, free association, talking therapy and so on, but I want to comment that Descartes assumes a world away to get cogito ergo sum, and I live in a world that seems to exist outside of myself. Lacan wants to reconcile the outside of us with the inside of us through magic.
I read Deleuze before I read this book. I wish I had read this book first. Deleuze plays the game just as seriously as Lacan does but Deleuze wisely takes the conclusions to their absurdness that Lacan is not willing to take them, but Lacan lays the groundwork. Lacan mentioned several times ‘Kierkegaard’s repetition’, and that would be what Deleuze means by ‘difference without a concept’, that’s why my first paragraph had that phrase in it.
Read
February 10, 2019For the Lacan students who desire the B-sides; most people will be fine without all of Lacan's papers. The only essential texts missing from the edition of the Écrits with only selections are, by my estimation, the essay on Poe and the essay on Kant and Sade.
Lacan is probably the only thinker I hold in high esteem whose writing style I very nearly despise. His style, he hoped, would train analysts in interpretation. As a reading experience, it means that Lacan meanders constantly; he often gets lost commenting on what seem to be highly abstruse matters unrelated to whatever he claims his central theme is; and his main theses are rarely argued for in any straightforward way. For me, reading him involves finding those key passages, even sentences, which stand out from the rest of the mess and seem to give it some sense of order. This requires patience, as such passages or lines appear only every five of ten pages. The book is slow going until one gets to those passages, however. Much like analysis, I suppose, it is slow going until the truth speaks, which then has to be read back into what seemed to be nothing but was in reality the coming-to-be of the truth, or at least of its saying.
The essays that are in the shorter edition of the Écrits truly are the best ones here, so I would recommend starting there and getting a hold of the two essays mentioned above missing from that collection.
As far as content goes, I will say three things that surprised me:
1) Readers of Žižek should be unsurprised by the presence of Hegelian themes in Lacan's writings; what surprised me was how frequent and essential Lacan's own references to Hegel are. There is much that is new in Žižek's Hegel-Lacan synthesis, but perhaps much of it is already there -- something Žižek would no doubt admit. Dialectical thinking, the master-slave dialectic, the beautiful soul, the law of the heart, and other concepts taken (and recognized as such) right from Hegel show up throughout.
2) Lacan sees the symbolic as being at work, partially, in animals as well as humans. Indeed, Lacan is more nuanced on the difference between human and animal than I expected, considering that he is a thinker of the human condition as such. But it would appear that there is room in Lacan for languages, or at least proto-languages, among animals, even if language has a special existence in and for man.
3) The Lacan of the Écrits strikes me as a structuralist.
Lacan is probably the only thinker I hold in high esteem whose writing style I very nearly despise. His style, he hoped, would train analysts in interpretation. As a reading experience, it means that Lacan meanders constantly; he often gets lost commenting on what seem to be highly abstruse matters unrelated to whatever he claims his central theme is; and his main theses are rarely argued for in any straightforward way. For me, reading him involves finding those key passages, even sentences, which stand out from the rest of the mess and seem to give it some sense of order. This requires patience, as such passages or lines appear only every five of ten pages. The book is slow going until one gets to those passages, however. Much like analysis, I suppose, it is slow going until the truth speaks, which then has to be read back into what seemed to be nothing but was in reality the coming-to-be of the truth, or at least of its saying.
The essays that are in the shorter edition of the Écrits truly are the best ones here, so I would recommend starting there and getting a hold of the two essays mentioned above missing from that collection.
As far as content goes, I will say three things that surprised me:
1) Readers of Žižek should be unsurprised by the presence of Hegelian themes in Lacan's writings; what surprised me was how frequent and essential Lacan's own references to Hegel are. There is much that is new in Žižek's Hegel-Lacan synthesis, but perhaps much of it is already there -- something Žižek would no doubt admit. Dialectical thinking, the master-slave dialectic, the beautiful soul, the law of the heart, and other concepts taken (and recognized as such) right from Hegel show up throughout.
2) Lacan sees the symbolic as being at work, partially, in animals as well as humans. Indeed, Lacan is more nuanced on the difference between human and animal than I expected, considering that he is a thinker of the human condition as such. But it would appear that there is room in Lacan for languages, or at least proto-languages, among animals, even if language has a special existence in and for man.
3) The Lacan of the Écrits strikes me as a structuralist.
January 28, 2021
I know from reading Bruce Fink (and har har Paul Ricœur's book on Freud) that Lacan's philosophy has a ton of potential (not to mention his actual influence on a couple writers I adore: Deleuze and Laruelle). However, Lacan himself is a horrible writer. Reading him is a very unenjoyable experience.
He very often feels the need to unexpectedly jump from one topic to another with little logical connecting tissue. He comes off as completely petty and overly self-important in the takedowns of his colleagues he performs with some regularity (especially because he barely takes the time to explain why he is so obviously correct). And despite the impressive web of concepts and literary references he weilds to back up his points, he barely ever ends up making points. There are really great passages here and there in the papers in Écrits, but to get to them, the reader has to slog through pages and pages of nebulous piles of psychoanalytic jargon, arguments which are interrupted half-way, obtuse irrelevant wordplay, and vague allusions to whatever books Lacan happened to be skimming at the time.
In short, this book sucks. Which itself sucks, because from what I've gotten from secondary sources, Lacanian philosophy is really interesting, just not when written by Lacan! blech
He very often feels the need to unexpectedly jump from one topic to another with little logical connecting tissue. He comes off as completely petty and overly self-important in the takedowns of his colleagues he performs with some regularity (especially because he barely takes the time to explain why he is so obviously correct). And despite the impressive web of concepts and literary references he weilds to back up his points, he barely ever ends up making points. There are really great passages here and there in the papers in Écrits, but to get to them, the reader has to slog through pages and pages of nebulous piles of psychoanalytic jargon, arguments which are interrupted half-way, obtuse irrelevant wordplay, and vague allusions to whatever books Lacan happened to be skimming at the time.
In short, this book sucks. Which itself sucks, because from what I've gotten from secondary sources, Lacanian philosophy is really interesting, just not when written by Lacan! blech
August 22, 2012
Some of these reviews crack me up. This is not a book that one reads once if they are going to understand Lacanian Psychoanalytic theory. It is much better to start out with other authors such as Bruce Fink. There is quite a list of them and many are very good. Another option is to begin with the seminars. One has to realize when reading Lacan that he did not direct his writing towards the general public but toward a very specific audience, a discourse directed toward psychoanalysis.
Lacan's writings along with Freud are still the benchmark for Philosopher's references and standards throughout the world.
Where the American Psychological community mainly deals with working with ego psychology, Lacan's work goes to the heart of the matter and brings to light the incredible importance of language.
Lacan's writings along with Freud are still the benchmark for Philosopher's references and standards throughout the world.
Where the American Psychological community mainly deals with working with ego psychology, Lacan's work goes to the heart of the matter and brings to light the incredible importance of language.
December 9, 2010
Mind-blowing. If you take the time to actually wrap your mind around these concepts they can do some powerful things for how you view yourself, others, and the world.
April 16, 2017
Oh, Lacan. How do I love and hate thee? Let me count the ways.
This is one of the hardest, most elusive, and most interdisciplinary texts I have ever laid eyes upon. Perhaps it was sheer masochism that made me read the whole thing, perhaps it was the paper I had to write on the mirror stage, the symbolic, the Real - I'm not sure. It was infuriating, thought-provoking, incredibly poetic, and beautiful in equal measure.
What is I, you, me, identity, persona? "Cogito, ergo sum" - do you think of yourself as a whole, unified person? Reading Lacan makes you realize that what you think of as your own stable identity is in fact, illusory, a construct, behind which the real subject presides. Any self-knowledge is, to some degree, an illusion. When you look in the mirror and see a unified, stable self, you have a moment of confusion because the reflection is far more one-dimensional than the entity that beholds it. Inside, we all are a formless, chaotic, continuous stream of consciousness made up of thoughts, desires, and images. But on the outside, we seem like a more or less stable entity with composed and symmetrical features that betray almost nothing of what’s going on within.
I am in love with this approach, and many ideas Lacan comes up with. I also love the view that other people simply won’t ever experience us the way we experience ourselves. That we will be almost entirely misunderstood, and will, in turn, almost entirely misunderstand. It is quite genius how he takes Freud's (and many others') theories and takes them one step further. It is also genius how he combines all psychoanalytic theories with language.
Yet then again, I am reading Irigaray and Cixous and it is impossible not to be angry at the erasure of women. Just like Freud, Lacan understood the world - and especially language - in terms of a one-sex model of sexuality and subjectivity. Like Irigaray, I disagree with Lacan's depiction of the Symbolic order as ahistorical and unchanging - language systems are malleable, and largely determined by power relationships that are always in flux. This one-sex model is everywhere in Lacan, it completely disregards and erases women, claiming us to be the "lacking" sex, and as a woman this is infuriating.
All in all, I think this book gave me a permanent headache - but what is life without some pain?
This is one of the hardest, most elusive, and most interdisciplinary texts I have ever laid eyes upon. Perhaps it was sheer masochism that made me read the whole thing, perhaps it was the paper I had to write on the mirror stage, the symbolic, the Real - I'm not sure. It was infuriating, thought-provoking, incredibly poetic, and beautiful in equal measure.
What is I, you, me, identity, persona? "Cogito, ergo sum" - do you think of yourself as a whole, unified person? Reading Lacan makes you realize that what you think of as your own stable identity is in fact, illusory, a construct, behind which the real subject presides. Any self-knowledge is, to some degree, an illusion. When you look in the mirror and see a unified, stable self, you have a moment of confusion because the reflection is far more one-dimensional than the entity that beholds it. Inside, we all are a formless, chaotic, continuous stream of consciousness made up of thoughts, desires, and images. But on the outside, we seem like a more or less stable entity with composed and symmetrical features that betray almost nothing of what’s going on within.
I am in love with this approach, and many ideas Lacan comes up with. I also love the view that other people simply won’t ever experience us the way we experience ourselves. That we will be almost entirely misunderstood, and will, in turn, almost entirely misunderstand. It is quite genius how he takes Freud's (and many others') theories and takes them one step further. It is also genius how he combines all psychoanalytic theories with language.
Yet then again, I am reading Irigaray and Cixous and it is impossible not to be angry at the erasure of women. Just like Freud, Lacan understood the world - and especially language - in terms of a one-sex model of sexuality and subjectivity. Like Irigaray, I disagree with Lacan's depiction of the Symbolic order as ahistorical and unchanging - language systems are malleable, and largely determined by power relationships that are always in flux. This one-sex model is everywhere in Lacan, it completely disregards and erases women, claiming us to be the "lacking" sex, and as a woman this is infuriating.
All in all, I think this book gave me a permanent headache - but what is life without some pain?
January 14, 2013
Fundamental. Magisterial. Dark, gothic, highly polemical, and piercingly sardonic. Lacan is a polished stylist, his language is of the highest standard. I recommend this book to everyone - read it closely, slowly, with a pencil in hand. But first read Freud, otherwise it might be difficult
July 1, 2022
2022 Review:
Ok first off, I didn't know what the heck I was talking about in my first review. I was trying to make sense of something that I hadn't properly been grasping. However today, with a successful linear reading of the Écrits, I am now confident that I have a good grasp on the early period of Lacan's thinking, which the Écrits is a point de capiton.
Now the first thing one must say is sort of like Magritte, "ceçi n'est pas un pipe"; I would qualify this book as "ceçi n'est pas un livre". It's not a book book. It's rather a collection of essays and papers that Lacan had presented over the years, which were gathered together by one of his students, and he felt needed to be done, because he wanted his impact to be felt for the contributions he had made concerning psychoanalysis up to this point.
Now to answer what this non-book book is... well... simply to say, it's about the unconscious. The question should then be posed, what is the unconscious? The unconscious is structured like a language of course. And that's the fundamental problem Lacan has spent his career addressing. We start at Freud, because he was the one to put the entire unconscious on the map, with the Interpretation of Dreams, and then Lacan like a masterful postmodern painter, has returned to Freud in order to introduce concepts, and correct things that Freud could not be able to see within his own lifetime. Particularly, the concept of the signifier.
I think that's where to end my review here, but to say, that this is an amazing text, it is not impossible to read, but does require some effort to become initiated into, in order to understand the chain of significations that Lacan is following.
One thing that still holds true since my 2017 review, the Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire is a phenomenal essay, but also the Position of the Unconscious which follows it is equally unparalleled.
I loved it, and I am now prepared to tackle reading every single seminar that Lacan gave...
2017 Review:
Once upon a time, I saw this book and laughed.
Why? Why, would I even consider getting into that??
Then I opened the first page... what the hell is he saying? Am I stupid or something?
I then tried to just power through it like I've done with other books. Not possible.
I had to put it down.
Now over a year later, it makes sense. I don't know how I could be without this thing in the professional world. It's the only clarity in a confusingly unclear world. Or maybe that means I'm completely bonkers. I heard that when Lacan gave Heidegger a copy of the Écrits, Heidegger said, "the doctor needs a doctor". I think some people would think so.
If there is one essay you should understand before reading the rest of the book, it would be The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire. I think that's a key to unlocking it all in a sense. Sort of like in that show Westworld, how on the inside of the skull, there is a labyrinth. Understand that and you understand Lacan. Only through your own lack.
If the DSM-V is required reading for the general masses; this should be required reading for the narrative based therapists and those who actually want political change.
Good luck in your journey!
Ok first off, I didn't know what the heck I was talking about in my first review. I was trying to make sense of something that I hadn't properly been grasping. However today, with a successful linear reading of the Écrits, I am now confident that I have a good grasp on the early period of Lacan's thinking, which the Écrits is a point de capiton.
Now the first thing one must say is sort of like Magritte, "ceçi n'est pas un pipe"; I would qualify this book as "ceçi n'est pas un livre". It's not a book book. It's rather a collection of essays and papers that Lacan had presented over the years, which were gathered together by one of his students, and he felt needed to be done, because he wanted his impact to be felt for the contributions he had made concerning psychoanalysis up to this point.
Now to answer what this non-book book is... well... simply to say, it's about the unconscious. The question should then be posed, what is the unconscious? The unconscious is structured like a language of course. And that's the fundamental problem Lacan has spent his career addressing. We start at Freud, because he was the one to put the entire unconscious on the map, with the Interpretation of Dreams, and then Lacan like a masterful postmodern painter, has returned to Freud in order to introduce concepts, and correct things that Freud could not be able to see within his own lifetime. Particularly, the concept of the signifier.
I think that's where to end my review here, but to say, that this is an amazing text, it is not impossible to read, but does require some effort to become initiated into, in order to understand the chain of significations that Lacan is following.
One thing that still holds true since my 2017 review, the Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire is a phenomenal essay, but also the Position of the Unconscious which follows it is equally unparalleled.
I loved it, and I am now prepared to tackle reading every single seminar that Lacan gave...
2017 Review:
Once upon a time, I saw this book and laughed.
Why? Why, would I even consider getting into that??
Then I opened the first page... what the hell is he saying? Am I stupid or something?
I then tried to just power through it like I've done with other books. Not possible.
I had to put it down.
Now over a year later, it makes sense. I don't know how I could be without this thing in the professional world. It's the only clarity in a confusingly unclear world. Or maybe that means I'm completely bonkers. I heard that when Lacan gave Heidegger a copy of the Écrits, Heidegger said, "the doctor needs a doctor". I think some people would think so.
If there is one essay you should understand before reading the rest of the book, it would be The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire. I think that's a key to unlocking it all in a sense. Sort of like in that show Westworld, how on the inside of the skull, there is a labyrinth. Understand that and you understand Lacan. Only through your own lack.
If the DSM-V is required reading for the general masses; this should be required reading for the narrative based therapists and those who actually want political change.
Good luck in your journey!
February 26, 2012
Ignore the star rating for this one. I had no clue how to rate it, so I shoved it somewhere in the middle.
Not going to lie, this one hurt to read. I'm no psych major, nor am I enamored with the subject as a layperson, so... I'm not sure why I really bothered. Let's call it masochistic curiosity.
It's dense, in places not readily comprehensible, and even with a reading guide (which I had and HIGHLY suggest you have if you want to take this on), I still struggled through it. In fact, the last two hundred pages were more an exercise in skim reading than anything. Some of the ideas presented were intriguing for sure, and I certainly won't discount Lacan's clear genius. You just have to wade through a lot of highly intellectual discourse and theory to find it. And I do mean wade through.
Unless you just really, really enjoy this kind of subject matter or unless it's a requirement for your PhD, just... yeah, read the cliff's notes, lol. That being said, I am sort of oddly satisfied that I gave it a shot and made it through at least most of it. It was a good brain exercise (or torture... call it what you will).
Not going to lie, this one hurt to read. I'm no psych major, nor am I enamored with the subject as a layperson, so... I'm not sure why I really bothered. Let's call it masochistic curiosity.
It's dense, in places not readily comprehensible, and even with a reading guide (which I had and HIGHLY suggest you have if you want to take this on), I still struggled through it. In fact, the last two hundred pages were more an exercise in skim reading than anything. Some of the ideas presented were intriguing for sure, and I certainly won't discount Lacan's clear genius. You just have to wade through a lot of highly intellectual discourse and theory to find it. And I do mean wade through.
Unless you just really, really enjoy this kind of subject matter or unless it's a requirement for your PhD, just... yeah, read the cliff's notes, lol. That being said, I am sort of oddly satisfied that I gave it a shot and made it through at least most of it. It was a good brain exercise (or torture... call it what you will).
February 3, 2014
Consciousness delineates unconsciousness. Understanding delineates misunderstanding. One must find oneself in Lacan's discourse, according to what one does and does not understand. I'm not sure how else to describe this book, or how it should be approached - at least in layman's terms. It's dense, it's difficult, and I wonder how much of it can be taken literally. To take Lacan 'literally' one must take the literal for granted - which is, I think, to miss the point entirely. The literal qua real is impossible; it is always deferred. Bearing this is in mind -literally or otherwise - Ecrits is quite an enjoyable, at times god-awfully infuriating read.
January 12, 2015
“O desejo é a essência da realidade. “
(Jacques Lacan)
(Jacques Lacan)
April 21, 2021
"I, truth, speak."
Lacan centered his career around his opposition to the degeneration of Freud's psychoanalysis into so many pitfalls that must be circumnavigated if the merits of Freud's work are to be received and revived. Most of those deviations stemmed from failures to recognize the essential role speech plays in healing, insight, initiation, truth, and being. Deviations to information theory, to Scholastic psychology, to behaviorism, to mysticism,—each path forsakes the responsibility that speech entails: all speech calls for a response, where the stakes are the (re)affirmation of the addressee as a subject, as someone who is capable of recognizing my own status as a person, sharing my reality in a meaningful way. Whenever I declare that you are X, X sets my own relation to you—if I say you're my friend, I receive back the message that I'm your friend in turn, simply by you being present and not refuting/correcting me, so long as I speak with integrity.
There's a distinction between empty speech and full speech: empty speech is everything that deflects from the important things that are weighing on your mind and important to you, and that generally fails to match your words to your intentions, needs, demands, and desires. In full speech, your words align with those four things, and your ego is disinhibited, its rigid walls momentarily disrupted; those are the intervals where seeds of lasting change can be planted, and where meaning can be punctuated by a listener's subtle gesture indicating the importance of the block of speech. Lacan calls these gestures scansions, like the line breaks in poems.
For an idea to present itself at all, it must appear through a narrative, and every narrator has their own fixations and biases. A drama can't manifest in the form of a pure structure, even if we can abstract a structure from a narrative. These narratives comprise what Lacan calls the imaginary register, and are outgrowths of the ego's demand for control, to fix things in place—stable, singular, definitive meanings for everything—, and to project and otherwise ward off feelings of internal fragmentation. The stories we tell ourselves when someone hurt us, especially when we've done wrong that we are unwilling to face,—such stories are the ego trading growth for a farce of stability, to save face, lest our self-images crumble as the incoherences in our narratives expose the lies we live and the truths we not only waste tremendous energy concealing, but that we're not even equipped to grasp: truth for Lacan seems to be something that can be expressed and shared, but not understood in the way we might understand gravity or the facts contained in an encyclopedia. If anything, truth is a rupturing force, that breaks free in spite of the subtle dishonesty we bathe ourselves in to maintain an orientation, a status quo.
If the story you tell yourself can be incoherent, that implies that there's coherence to approach: that's the symbolic order. As it turns out, we always say more than we mean, and mean other than we say, because of the cascades of associations and contexts that any non-trivial sentence with any personal charge proliferates. We can intuitively pick up on a lot of this information, but many of us are used to using tone and body language as cues; Lacan warns that relying on nonverbal cues is a risky move that often borders on proclaiming telepathy to mask that you're merely projecting your own intentions, "alibis" as Lacan says, onto the person. No, to listen for truth's speech is to listen like a poet, examining where a phrase has multiple significant meanings (such as someone saying something weighs heavily on them when they're struggling with weight/body-image symptoms), expanding rather than contracting your intuition to hear the gaps, displacements, resistances, and so on that permeate speech, especially one it's out of pure empty speech.
Metaphors play a much more significant role in speech than analogies do. An analogy is nothing more than a comparison, but a metaphor substitutes a subject for an object, which then serves as a scapegoat for whatever the speaker unconsciously wishes to confess or explore. Lacan's example: "his pen was neither miserly nor hateful", where "his pen" is devoid of any personality, but the writer is not; the writer is miserly and hateful, but "his pen" blocks him off from that realization by the same stroke as it points the way to that realization.
Once we look closer, we realize that metaphor pervades language, because signifiers don't stand for things, but stand in for things, i.e. are substitutes, ersatz scapegoats mediating our feeble efforts at grasping the world on its own terms, by approaching the world with our terms and forcing it to conform to those terms before anything can enter into perception and understanding. This is especially clear with signifiers that explicitly only refer to other signifiers, like much of linguistic jargon and many metonyms (e.g. by "a fleet of 30 sails" we know is meant "a fleet of 30 ships", even though most ships have either zero or multiple sails).
While metaphors are the locks and keys of symptoms, metonyms are the slippery garden paths of desire. Desire is a bizarre concept in this book, because it isn't articulable, or fulfillable; we're constantly alienated from our desires, because desire is at root a desire for recognition, and at stem a desire copied from other people as models. Desire inhabits the fissure where demand outstrips need, and this fissure is one of the fragmentations that constitute the subject, another being the irreconcilable gap between speaker and spoken: when I say "I", I am the speaker, but "I" am spoken; the speaker never appears in the material of speech that she or he generates.
Demand is the realm of the imaginary. Desire is the realm of the symbolic. Need is the realm of the real; the real register is an ill-defined crossroads of contingency and physiology. While the imaginary is where we fool ourselves into overestimating our freedom, through accommodating mirages that avoid challenge when they're not voiced: think of how hard it is to polish a rehearsal, and then realize how little emotional honesty a rehearsal is able to achieve because it's so overcontrolled. Or, better still, think of how much you've "learned" through introspection, only for your self-image to eventually be uprooted when put into practice. We use resistances like empty speech and avoiding people to keep our self-images far away from destabilization: even when we're so thoroughly convinced that we're doing everything right in terms of maturation, most likely we've merely confined ourselves to a minor region, one that's controllable, where we're in charge, rather than what in us we don't accept as us.
We enter into human reality as subjects by seeing ourselves in a mirror and taking in a whole self-image—which is complete and controllable—at once. That's more of a myth than anything else, one of the few Lacan weaves. What's important there is threefold: first, it fixes an ideal of wholeness that we strive for, tantalized; second, it allows us to take ourselves as objects; and third, it confronts us with those in others, that they can take us as objects and relate us to their ideals. The third point inaugurates our competitive nature as strategic rivals, above and beyond the camouflage and feints in the animal kingdom. You can think about how I'll think about your action, and change your plan accordingly. Maybe that helps explain why humanity's preeminent antagonist is the master of serpentine language.
Lacan refers to speech as a lure, and as tesserae. Lures maneuver empty speech and metacognition to secure prestige and buttress self-imagery (in the imaginary). Tesserae are tokens that identify people in an exchange. Exchange, the circulation of signifiers, is another vital part of speech. It's often done without speech now thanks to the ability to text people, but signifiers flow through, bind, and rearrange relations between people. Your use of language distills and spreads your unique values, just as the trade of gifts condenses the values unique to each culture, entraining these differences to enable communication and alliance, and open the door for actions like betrayal. Speech is a series of pacts, accompanying the responsibility each exchange carries, through which you (re)calibrate where you stand with each person you interact with. This is faulty but indispensable, as you can only understand yourself through others' eyes.
No matter how fiercely we resist truth, no matter how sophisticated our distortions of it, it speaks. It will never go away, not as long as there's a shred of merit in Freud's project. Even in empty speech, truth shines; its light is beset by fog, dimmed, yes, but it will not fade. That is, we always have within ourselves the tools we need to mature, to dig ourselves out of the ways our upbringings and bad habits have fucked us over, even if those tools require the intervention of perceptive others to reveal, sharpen, and guide.
Lacan is rather pessimistic about our capacity for growth, but his ideas can be read in a hopeful light and repurposed for your own needs, as I've implied throughout this synopsis. Most of us reading this aren't going to be psychoanalysts, so the rather extreme advice Lacan gives for interactions with clients can be tweaked to improve our healing influence on others, through more compassionate and intellectually honest listening. Norms, insecurities, anxieties, and ignorance drown out our capacity for full speech, but psychoanalysis teaches us that most people have understandings of the principles psychoanalysts study and apply, just deeply buried, waiting to surface around someone able and willing to listen to their story and hold them accountable for telling it.
I don't know if I would recommend this to anyone. It's a brutal book. I really only read it because I wanted to prove I could keep a commitment to daily reading, which I did, for six months, before deciding I might get more mileage focusing on books I could make more tangible progress in. But Écrits was a trial-by-fire of improving my reading skills, as someone who has always struggled with reading, and who spends most of the time short-circuiting and not processing anything. I think my ability to follow complicated threads has improved a fair amount through this book. Everyone says to just read the seminars if you want to understand Lacan's content. I haven't read the seminars. There's an enormous amount to say about the book that I just don't have the understanding to share, but I tried to cover many of the anchors of Lacan's unique take on speech in the hopes of showing how they might be meaningful beyond merely fascinating.
Lacan centered his career around his opposition to the degeneration of Freud's psychoanalysis into so many pitfalls that must be circumnavigated if the merits of Freud's work are to be received and revived. Most of those deviations stemmed from failures to recognize the essential role speech plays in healing, insight, initiation, truth, and being. Deviations to information theory, to Scholastic psychology, to behaviorism, to mysticism,—each path forsakes the responsibility that speech entails: all speech calls for a response, where the stakes are the (re)affirmation of the addressee as a subject, as someone who is capable of recognizing my own status as a person, sharing my reality in a meaningful way. Whenever I declare that you are X, X sets my own relation to you—if I say you're my friend, I receive back the message that I'm your friend in turn, simply by you being present and not refuting/correcting me, so long as I speak with integrity.
There's a distinction between empty speech and full speech: empty speech is everything that deflects from the important things that are weighing on your mind and important to you, and that generally fails to match your words to your intentions, needs, demands, and desires. In full speech, your words align with those four things, and your ego is disinhibited, its rigid walls momentarily disrupted; those are the intervals where seeds of lasting change can be planted, and where meaning can be punctuated by a listener's subtle gesture indicating the importance of the block of speech. Lacan calls these gestures scansions, like the line breaks in poems.
For an idea to present itself at all, it must appear through a narrative, and every narrator has their own fixations and biases. A drama can't manifest in the form of a pure structure, even if we can abstract a structure from a narrative. These narratives comprise what Lacan calls the imaginary register, and are outgrowths of the ego's demand for control, to fix things in place—stable, singular, definitive meanings for everything—, and to project and otherwise ward off feelings of internal fragmentation. The stories we tell ourselves when someone hurt us, especially when we've done wrong that we are unwilling to face,—such stories are the ego trading growth for a farce of stability, to save face, lest our self-images crumble as the incoherences in our narratives expose the lies we live and the truths we not only waste tremendous energy concealing, but that we're not even equipped to grasp: truth for Lacan seems to be something that can be expressed and shared, but not understood in the way we might understand gravity or the facts contained in an encyclopedia. If anything, truth is a rupturing force, that breaks free in spite of the subtle dishonesty we bathe ourselves in to maintain an orientation, a status quo.
If the story you tell yourself can be incoherent, that implies that there's coherence to approach: that's the symbolic order. As it turns out, we always say more than we mean, and mean other than we say, because of the cascades of associations and contexts that any non-trivial sentence with any personal charge proliferates. We can intuitively pick up on a lot of this information, but many of us are used to using tone and body language as cues; Lacan warns that relying on nonverbal cues is a risky move that often borders on proclaiming telepathy to mask that you're merely projecting your own intentions, "alibis" as Lacan says, onto the person. No, to listen for truth's speech is to listen like a poet, examining where a phrase has multiple significant meanings (such as someone saying something weighs heavily on them when they're struggling with weight/body-image symptoms), expanding rather than contracting your intuition to hear the gaps, displacements, resistances, and so on that permeate speech, especially one it's out of pure empty speech.
Metaphors play a much more significant role in speech than analogies do. An analogy is nothing more than a comparison, but a metaphor substitutes a subject for an object, which then serves as a scapegoat for whatever the speaker unconsciously wishes to confess or explore. Lacan's example: "his pen was neither miserly nor hateful", where "his pen" is devoid of any personality, but the writer is not; the writer is miserly and hateful, but "his pen" blocks him off from that realization by the same stroke as it points the way to that realization.
Once we look closer, we realize that metaphor pervades language, because signifiers don't stand for things, but stand in for things, i.e. are substitutes, ersatz scapegoats mediating our feeble efforts at grasping the world on its own terms, by approaching the world with our terms and forcing it to conform to those terms before anything can enter into perception and understanding. This is especially clear with signifiers that explicitly only refer to other signifiers, like much of linguistic jargon and many metonyms (e.g. by "a fleet of 30 sails" we know is meant "a fleet of 30 ships", even though most ships have either zero or multiple sails).
While metaphors are the locks and keys of symptoms, metonyms are the slippery garden paths of desire. Desire is a bizarre concept in this book, because it isn't articulable, or fulfillable; we're constantly alienated from our desires, because desire is at root a desire for recognition, and at stem a desire copied from other people as models. Desire inhabits the fissure where demand outstrips need, and this fissure is one of the fragmentations that constitute the subject, another being the irreconcilable gap between speaker and spoken: when I say "I", I am the speaker, but "I" am spoken; the speaker never appears in the material of speech that she or he generates.
Demand is the realm of the imaginary. Desire is the realm of the symbolic. Need is the realm of the real; the real register is an ill-defined crossroads of contingency and physiology. While the imaginary is where we fool ourselves into overestimating our freedom, through accommodating mirages that avoid challenge when they're not voiced: think of how hard it is to polish a rehearsal, and then realize how little emotional honesty a rehearsal is able to achieve because it's so overcontrolled. Or, better still, think of how much you've "learned" through introspection, only for your self-image to eventually be uprooted when put into practice. We use resistances like empty speech and avoiding people to keep our self-images far away from destabilization: even when we're so thoroughly convinced that we're doing everything right in terms of maturation, most likely we've merely confined ourselves to a minor region, one that's controllable, where we're in charge, rather than what in us we don't accept as us.
We enter into human reality as subjects by seeing ourselves in a mirror and taking in a whole self-image—which is complete and controllable—at once. That's more of a myth than anything else, one of the few Lacan weaves. What's important there is threefold: first, it fixes an ideal of wholeness that we strive for, tantalized; second, it allows us to take ourselves as objects; and third, it confronts us with those in others, that they can take us as objects and relate us to their ideals. The third point inaugurates our competitive nature as strategic rivals, above and beyond the camouflage and feints in the animal kingdom. You can think about how I'll think about your action, and change your plan accordingly. Maybe that helps explain why humanity's preeminent antagonist is the master of serpentine language.
Lacan refers to speech as a lure, and as tesserae. Lures maneuver empty speech and metacognition to secure prestige and buttress self-imagery (in the imaginary). Tesserae are tokens that identify people in an exchange. Exchange, the circulation of signifiers, is another vital part of speech. It's often done without speech now thanks to the ability to text people, but signifiers flow through, bind, and rearrange relations between people. Your use of language distills and spreads your unique values, just as the trade of gifts condenses the values unique to each culture, entraining these differences to enable communication and alliance, and open the door for actions like betrayal. Speech is a series of pacts, accompanying the responsibility each exchange carries, through which you (re)calibrate where you stand with each person you interact with. This is faulty but indispensable, as you can only understand yourself through others' eyes.
No matter how fiercely we resist truth, no matter how sophisticated our distortions of it, it speaks. It will never go away, not as long as there's a shred of merit in Freud's project. Even in empty speech, truth shines; its light is beset by fog, dimmed, yes, but it will not fade. That is, we always have within ourselves the tools we need to mature, to dig ourselves out of the ways our upbringings and bad habits have fucked us over, even if those tools require the intervention of perceptive others to reveal, sharpen, and guide.
Lacan is rather pessimistic about our capacity for growth, but his ideas can be read in a hopeful light and repurposed for your own needs, as I've implied throughout this synopsis. Most of us reading this aren't going to be psychoanalysts, so the rather extreme advice Lacan gives for interactions with clients can be tweaked to improve our healing influence on others, through more compassionate and intellectually honest listening. Norms, insecurities, anxieties, and ignorance drown out our capacity for full speech, but psychoanalysis teaches us that most people have understandings of the principles psychoanalysts study and apply, just deeply buried, waiting to surface around someone able and willing to listen to their story and hold them accountable for telling it.
I don't know if I would recommend this to anyone. It's a brutal book. I really only read it because I wanted to prove I could keep a commitment to daily reading, which I did, for six months, before deciding I might get more mileage focusing on books I could make more tangible progress in. But Écrits was a trial-by-fire of improving my reading skills, as someone who has always struggled with reading, and who spends most of the time short-circuiting and not processing anything. I think my ability to follow complicated threads has improved a fair amount through this book. Everyone says to just read the seminars if you want to understand Lacan's content. I haven't read the seminars. There's an enormous amount to say about the book that I just don't have the understanding to share, but I tried to cover many of the anchors of Lacan's unique take on speech in the hopes of showing how they might be meaningful beyond merely fascinating.
December 18, 2024
What I realized after reading a fair bit of Lacan is that he is most fun to read when he is talking about the radical difference between the rest of the circus animals and human beings in a sort of big picture speculative anthropology way. For example, Lacan observes that animals are entirely prey to imaginary capture despite being able to put up 'ruses'. In analytic parlance, they attribute 'knowledge' states to others. When a prey animal puts up a ruse to deceive would-be predators, they do not count on the latter being able to recognize that ruse for what it is, for this capacity for 'belief attribution' presupposes the use of what Lacan calls 'signifiers' (signifiers represent the subject for another signifier). Only humans, not animals, posit the Other who can deceive us in Speech because they are the guarantor of Truth.
So, what happens when signifiers and the symbolic order (whose elements operate according to a logical, not chronological time) infect an animal prematurely ejected from its mother's womb? You end up with a being whose animal aggressivity, organic needs and instincts are taken over and transformed by invariant structures that force the poor brute to speak and act out codes that he does not comprehend. Philosophers say the real is structured like the rational. In the same vein, Lacan, somewhat retrofitting Freud with Saussure and the Structuralist revolution, claims that the unconscious is structured like a language. Or better yet, it IS the totality of the effects of Speech on an animal. Tics, jokes, slips of tongues and yes, dreams, are the mode in which it speaks within us and with us. This is the privileged object of psychoanalysis. Unlike his forebearer, Lacan does not seem too preoccupied with defending psychoanalysis' presumed 'scientific' status.
These are just my initial thoughts. I profess that I found these essays are quite challenging on the first read through, and not because of Lacan's style (you quickly get accustomed to the way he writes). The graphs and the diagrams kind of flew past my head, which is fine, I guess. In any case, actually reading Lacan has slightly reinforced my conviction that psychoanalytic theses on human nature are not without philosophical substance and merits serious study in spite of the major flaws one might want to attribute to Freud's or Lacan's methodologies in retrospect.
So, what happens when signifiers and the symbolic order (whose elements operate according to a logical, not chronological time) infect an animal prematurely ejected from its mother's womb? You end up with a being whose animal aggressivity, organic needs and instincts are taken over and transformed by invariant structures that force the poor brute to speak and act out codes that he does not comprehend. Philosophers say the real is structured like the rational. In the same vein, Lacan, somewhat retrofitting Freud with Saussure and the Structuralist revolution, claims that the unconscious is structured like a language. Or better yet, it IS the totality of the effects of Speech on an animal. Tics, jokes, slips of tongues and yes, dreams, are the mode in which it speaks within us and with us. This is the privileged object of psychoanalysis. Unlike his forebearer, Lacan does not seem too preoccupied with defending psychoanalysis' presumed 'scientific' status.
These are just my initial thoughts. I profess that I found these essays are quite challenging on the first read through, and not because of Lacan's style (you quickly get accustomed to the way he writes). The graphs and the diagrams kind of flew past my head, which is fine, I guess. In any case, actually reading Lacan has slightly reinforced my conviction that psychoanalytic theses on human nature are not without philosophical substance and merits serious study in spite of the major flaws one might want to attribute to Freud's or Lacan's methodologies in retrospect.
Read
June 6, 2024Thanks to psychoanalyst and translator Bruce Fink, the Écrits (in English, Writings) of Jacques Lacan have been available since 2006. Originally published in French, the book contains Lacan's landmark essays, including his "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" using the Poe tale as an example of how meaning is communicated in psychoanalysis; "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience," Lacan's conception of how subjectivity is formed in infancy; and "Kant with Sade," which compares Kant's categorical imperative to the Marquis de Sade's call for wanton desire, and which comes out in favor of Kant.
Readers will also find a number of other essays and lectures of value here. Among these is "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," explaining the relationship between linguistics and psychoanalysis, at least as Lacan conceives the fields. Another is "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious." The latter writing is on how work on the unconscious is what allows a patient to overcome his divided subjectivity in his or her split between the egoic sense of self and his or her conception of what others think of him or her or his or her expectations to conform to others.
Despite what you may have heard, the Écrits is not the best starting point for reading Lacan. If you are interested, I would recommend his Seminar II. It even contains a better account of his use of Poe's "Purloined Letter" as an illustration of meaning transfer in the psychoanalytic understanding than what you will get in the Écrits. I would also recommend, though some diehard Lacanians would disagree, Lacan's Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis . For my money, these two seminars are a better starting point for Lacan than anything else.
Readers will also find a number of other essays and lectures of value here. Among these is "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," explaining the relationship between linguistics and psychoanalysis, at least as Lacan conceives the fields. Another is "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious." The latter writing is on how work on the unconscious is what allows a patient to overcome his divided subjectivity in his or her split between the egoic sense of self and his or her conception of what others think of him or her or his or her expectations to conform to others.
Despite what you may have heard, the Écrits is not the best starting point for reading Lacan. If you are interested, I would recommend his Seminar II. It even contains a better account of his use of Poe's "Purloined Letter" as an illustration of meaning transfer in the psychoanalytic understanding than what you will get in the Écrits. I would also recommend, though some diehard Lacanians would disagree, Lacan's Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis . For my money, these two seminars are a better starting point for Lacan than anything else.
Read
April 13, 2022i think lacan's birthday is the perfect time to officially give up. I'll flip through specific parts as theyre referenced in my other reading, but im never finishing this shit. me head too tiny
February 11, 2008
Umm...okay so I didn't technically "finish" this book because no non-Lacanian psychotherapist really has ever finished this book, at least to my knowledge. It's nonetheless worth reading the few chapters I did to remember how dumb you are, or how smart you are, depending upon the outcome. And if you like someone who uses mathematical equations to explain meta-psychology, this is your book buddy!
May 6, 2010
I often love what people do with Lacan, and would have had an even tougher time going with Laclau and Mouffe without at least a passing knowledge of his work. However, to borrow Lacan's own metaphor that writing is like forcing a reader to pass through a specific system (like a digestive system), reading Lacan often makes me feel like shit.
Very demanding. I missed a flight reading this in the waiting area.
Very demanding. I missed a flight reading this in the waiting area.
April 18, 2012
A poetic work that marries the diverse, complex fields of Freudian psychoanalysis and linguistics. Conceptually rich and certainly of worth to developing one's critical theories. The poetic language ensures a degree of inscrutability, but I suppose complexity of thought will inevitably reflect in style.
July 22, 2015
There were a number of threads here, but I dropped most of them when I stopped reading for six months.
September 14, 2013
Use this book as a door stop or as an intellectual book shelf bastion that will immediately impress anyone uncritical enough to be friends with lacanian psychoanalysis
December 27, 2010
I love the density his prose, how he circles round his subject nibbling away at the edges to get to the center... a kind of poetry.
March 3, 2015
unconscious structured like a language, or something. mirror stage. bleh.
December 21, 2011
Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Had to take a semester off of college, decided to read some of the most difficult books possible - Thanks Lacan!
January 7, 2013
It makes complete sense when you are high.
The pay-off isn't worth the effort unless you have that much spare time.
The pay-off isn't worth the effort unless you have that much spare time.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 131 reviews