Brilliant and innovative, Jacques Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, the drives, the law, and enjoyment. This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan's seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career.

This volume is based on a year's seminar in which Dr. Lacan addressed a larger, less specialized audience than ever before, among whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted to introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based, namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. Along the way he argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on topics ranging from sexuality and death to alienation and repression. This book constitutes the essence of Dr. Lacan's sensibility.

Taking us into and beyond the realm of Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacan examines the psychoses' inescapable connection to the symbolic process through which signifier is joined with signified. Lacan deftly navigates the ontological levels of the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real to explain psychosis as foreclosure, or rejection of the primordial signifier. Then, bridging the gap between the theoretical and the practical, Lacan discusses the implications for treatment. In these lectures on the psychoses, Lacan's renowned theory of metaphor and metonymy, along with the concept of the quilting point, appears for the first time.

The title is, at first glance, enigmatic. Clue: it concerns men and women--their most concrete, amorous, and sexual relations in everyday life, as well as in their dreams and fantasies. It has nothing to do with what biology studies under the heading of sexuality, of course. Must we leave this field to poetry, novels, and ideologies? Lacan attempts to provide a logic for it here--one that is quite cunning.

In the sexual realm, it is not enough to be; one must also exhibit. That is true of animals. Ethology has detailed the display behavior that precedes and conditions mating: it is, as a rule, the male who signals his intentions to a potential partner by exhibiting shapes, colors, and postures. These imaginary signifiers constitute what we call semblance. Similar exhibitions have been noted in human beings, and have served as grist for satire. In order to serve as grist for science, we must clearly distinguish them from the real that they veil and manifest at the same time--that of jouissance.

The latter is not the same for both sexes. Difficult to locate in women--and in fact, diffuse and unsituable--the real at stake for men is coordinated with a major semblance: the phallus. The upshot being that, as opposed to what commonsense would have us believe, men are slaves of the semblance they prop up, whereas, women are freer in this regard, and are also closer to the real; and that if a man is to sexually encounter a woman, he must put semblance to the test of the real, which is tantamount for him to the moment of truth; and that, if the phallus is suitable for signifying man as such--every man--feminine jouissance, because it is not wholly taken up in semblance, constitutes an objection to the universal.

A logic is, therefore, possible, if one has the audacity to write the phallic function as follows, F(x), and to formalize the two distinct ways in which a subject can be sexualized by inscribing himself in that function as a variable. This approach requires us to go beyond the myths invented by Freud, those of the Oedipus complex and of the father of the primal horde (Totem and Taboo); to mobilize Aristotle, Peirce, and the theory of quantification; and to elucidate the true nature of writing, including both Chinese and Japanese.

At the end of this trajectory, the reader will know how to elucidate Lacan's aphorism, There's no such thing as a sexual relationship.
Jacques-Alain Miller

Jacques Lacan is widely recognized as a key figure in the history of psychoanalysis and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th Century. In Anxiety, now available for the first time in English, he explores the nature of anxiety, suggesting that it is not nostalgia for the object that causes anxiety but rather its imminence.

In what was to be the last of his year-long seminars at Saint-Anne hospital, Lacan's 1962-63 lessons form the keystone to this classic phase of his teaching. Here we meet for the first time the notorious a in its oral, anal, scopic and vociferated guises, alongside Lacan's exploration of the question of the 'analyst's desire'. Arriving at these concepts from a multitude of angles, Lacan leads his audience with great care through a range of recurring themes such as anxiety between jouissance and desire, counter-transference and interpretation, and the fantasy and its frame.

This important volume, which forms Book X of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, will be of great interest to students and practitioners of psychoanalysis and to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences, from literature and critical theory to sociology, psychology and gender studies.

What does Lacan show us? He shows us that desire is not a biological function; that it is not correlated with a natural object; and that its object is fantasized. Because of this, desire is extravagant. It cannot be grasped by those who might try to master it. It plays tricks on them. Yet if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In psychoanalysis, the goal is to interpret--that is, to read--the message regarding desire that is harbored within the symptom.

Although desire upsets us, it also inspires us to invent artifices that can serve us as a compass. An animal species has a single natural compass. Human beings, on the other hand, have multiple compasses: signifying montages and discourses. They tell you what to do: how to think, how to enjoy, and how to reproduce. Yet each person's fantasy remains irreducible to shared ideals.

Up until recently, all of our compasses, no matter how varied, pointed in the same direction: toward the Father. We considered the patriarch to be an anthropological invariant. His decline accelerated owing to increasing equality, the growth of capitalism, and the ever-greater domination of technology. We have reached the end of the Father Age.

Another discourse is in the process of taking the former's place. It champions innovation over tradition; networks over hierarchies; the draw of the future over the weight of the past; femininity over virility. Where there had previously been a fixed order, transformational flows constantly push back any and all limits.

Freud was a product of the Father Age. He did a great deal to save it. The Catholic Church finally realized this. Lacan followed the way paved by Freud, but it led him to posit that the father is a symptom. He demonstrates that here using Hamlet as an example.

What people have latched onto about Lacan's work--his formalization of the Oedipus complex and his emphasis on the Name-of-the-Father--was merely his point of departure. Seminar VI already revises this: the Oedipus complex is not the only solution to desire, it is merely a normalized form thereof; it is, moreover, a pathogenic form; it does not exhaustively explain desire's course. Hence the eulogy of perversion with which this seminar ends: Lacan views perversion here as a rebellion against the identifications that assure the maintenance of social routines.

This Seminar predicted the revamping of formally established conformisms and even their explosion. We have reached that point. Lacan is talking about us.

Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades's desire - ágalma, the good object.

I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.

It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire's serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates's desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other - the object, ágalma - was at his mercy.

Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed - its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.

Jacques Lacan

Psychoanalysis is certainly one of the most contested areas of debate within feminism. This book presents articles on feminine sexuality by Lacan and members of the école freudienne, the school of psychoanalysis that Lacan directed in Paris from 1964 to 1980.

The question of feminine sexuality has divided the psychoanalytic movement since the 1920s. Despite their opposition to each other, contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism both reject Freud's phallocentrism. This book forcefully reasserts the importance of the castration complex in Freud's work and of the phallus in the work of Lacan, offering them not as a reflection of a theory based on male supremacy and privilege but as the terms through which any such privilege is exposed as a fraud. Lacan's rereading of Freud is seen here to reveal, in a way that no other account has been able to do, the arbitrary and fictional nature of both male and female sexual identity and, specifically, the fantasy behind the category woman as the dominant fetish of our culture. These texts reveal that women constantly exceed the barriers of the definition to which they are confined.

Before he became an analyst, Lacan was a psychiatrist. The articles in the present volume would not be being republished if they didn't invite us to read them retroactively. What can they teach us about the formation of this future analyst?

Lacan's clinical approach is rooted in the uniqueness of each case, which is only ever chosen for its singularity. Each one must necessarily present an original character or be atypical. One might recognise from the outset an orientation towards the one-by-one required by the practice of psychoanalysis.

The singularity of each case re-occurs at the level of the clinical details, studied with a concern for precision that extends down to the smallest detail, to the point where the observation may seem labyrinthine to the reader. Lacan will later declare his taste for fidelity to the symptom's formal envelope.

Three other features carry traces of the future. There is the use of the word structure to refer to the organisation of an entity that forms a whole, separate from other entities, and detached from the concept of development. There is the importance given to the analysis of the writings of patients. And then there is the related connection established between symptoms and literary creations.

Sollers once wrote that, to him, Claudel was first and foremost the man who wrote, Paradise is around us at this very moment, all its forests attentive like a great orchestra that invisibly adores and implores. The whole invention of the Universe with its notes falling vertiginously one by one into the abyss where the wonders of our dimensions are written.

Well, Lacan is, to me, the one who says in this Seminar, We are all familiar with hell, it is everyday life.

Is that the same thing? No, I don't think so. Here there is no adoration, no invisible orchestra, no vertigo or wonders. Let us begin by the end: Lacan evacuated from the rue d'Ulm along with his audience, not without resistance or an uproar. The episode was in all the papers. What had he done to deserve such a fate? He had spoken not only to psychoanalysts, but also to young people who were still fired up by the events of May 1968, who nevertheless accepted him as a master of discourse at the same time as they dreamt of subverting the university system. What did he tell them? That Revolution means returning to the same place. That knowledge now imposes its law on power and has become uncontrollable. That thought is censorship itself. He spoke to them about Marx, but also about Pascal's wager--which became in his hands a new version of the master/slave dialectic--not to mention the foundations of set theory. He moved on to a discussion of perversion, and models of hysteria and obsession. All of that is connected, scintillates, and captivates.

Between the lines, the dialogue between Lacan and himself continues regarding the subject of jouissance and the relationship between jouissance and speech and language.

Alcibiades attempted to seduce Socrates, he wanted to make him, and in the most openly avowed way possible, into someone instrumental and subordinate to what? To the object of Alcibiades' desire - ágalma, the good object.

I would go even further. How can we analysts fail to recognize what is involved? He says quite clearly: Socrates has the good object in his stomach. Here Socrates is nothing but the envelope in which the object of desire is found.

It is in order to clearly emphasize that he is nothing but this envelope that Alcibiades tries to show that Socrates is desire's serf in his relations with Alcibiades, that Socrates is enslaved to Alcibiades by his desire. Although Alcibiades was aware that Socrates desired him, he wanted to see Socrates' desire manifest itself in a sign, in order to know that the other - the object, ágalma - was at his mercy.

Now, it is precisely because he failed in this undertaking that Alcibiades disgraces himself, and makes of his confession something that is so affectively laden. The daemon of Αἰδώς (Aidós), Shame, about which I spoke to you before in this context, is what intervenes here. This is what is violated here. The most shocking secret is unveiled before everyone; the ultimate mainspring of desire, which in love relations must always be more or less dissimulated, is revealed - its aim is the fall of the Other, A, into the other, a.

Jacques Lacan

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.

The second half of this illuminating volume, A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, includes the dossier on the institutional debate. The papers it comprises--such as the July 1953 report from the president of the International Psychanalytic Association, Heinz Hartmann--document some of the controversy that swirled around Lacan for the last thirty years of his teaching, including his expulsion from the IPA in 1953, his excommunication in 1963, and his key responses in the form of letters and talk.

For anyone hoping to understand the institutionalization of Freudian thought and the challenge Lacan represents, this is an essential work.

This new translation of Jacques Lacan's deliberation on psychoanalysis and contemporary social order offers welcome, readable access to the brilliant author's seminal thinking on Freud, Marx, and Hegel; patterns of social and sexual behavior; and the nature and function of science and knowledge in the contemporary world.

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, and prefaced by Jacques-Alain Miller, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst after Freud.

Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd looks on, transfixed by this enigma-made-man, absorbing the ipse dixit and anticipating some illumination that is taking its time to appear.
Non lucet. It's shady in here, and the Théodores go hunting for their matches. Still, they say, cuicumque in sua arte perito credendum est, whosoever is expert in his art is to be lent credence. At what point is a person mad? The master himself poses the question.
That was back in the day. Those were the mysteries of Paris forty years hence.
A Dante clasping Virgil's hand to be led through the circles of the Inferno, Lacan took the hand of James Joyce, the unreadable Irishman, and, in the wake of this slender Commander of the Faithless, made with heavy and faltering step onto the incandescent zone where symptomatic women and ravaging men burn and writhe.
An equivocal troupe was in the struggling audience: his son-in-law; a dishevelled writer, young and just as unreadable back then; two dialoguing mathematicians; and a professor from Lyon vouching for the seriousness of the whole affair. A discreet Pasiphaë was being put to work backstage.
Smirk then, my good fellows! Be my guest. Make fun of it all! That's what our comic illusion is for. That way, you shall know nothing of what is happening right before your very eyes: the most carefully considered, the most lucid, and the most intrepid calling into question of the art that Freud invented, better known under its pseudonym: psychoanalysis.
--Jacques-Alain Miller

I am the product of priests, Lacan once said of himself. Educated by the Marist Brothers (or Little Brothers of Mary), he was a pious child and acquired considerable, personal knowledge of the torments and cunning of Christian spirituality. He was wonderfully able to speak to Catholics and to bring them around to psychoanalysis. Jesuits flocked to his school.

Freud, an old-style Enlightenment optimist, believed religion was merely an illusion that the progress of the scientific spirit would dissipate in the future. Lacan did not share this belief in the slightest: he thought, on the contrary, that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science.
--Jacques-Alain Miller

What astonishing success the Name-of-the-Father has had! Everyone finds something in it. Who one's father is isn't immediately obvious, hardly being visible to the naked eye. Paternity is first and foremost determined by one's culture. As Lacan said, The Name-of-the-Father creates the function of the father. But then where does the plural stem from?

It isn't pagan, for it is found in the Bible. He who speaks from the burning bush says of Himself that He doesn't have just one Name. In other words, the Father has no proper Name. It is not a figure of speech, but rather a function. The Father has as many names as the function has props.

What is its function? The religious function par excellence, that of tying things together. What things? The signifier and the signified, law and desire, thought and the body. In short, the symbolic and the imaginary. Yet if these two become tied to the real in a three-part knot, the Name-of-the-Father is no longer anything but mere semblance. On the other hand, if without it everything falls apart, it is the symptom of a failed knotting.

- Jacques-Alain Miller

'I've been talking to brick walls' says Lacan, meaning: 'Neither to you, nor to the Big Other. I'm speaking by myself. And this is precisely what interests you. It's up to you to interpret me.'

These brick walls are those of the chapel at Sainte-Anne hospital. Getting back in touch with his younger years as a junior doctor, Lacan amuses himself, improvises, and lets himself go. The intention is a polemical one: the best of his pupils, captivated by the idea that analysis evacuates all prior knowledge, have been raising the banner of non-knowledge, borrowed from Bataille. No, says Lacan, psychoanalysis proceeds from a supposed knowledge, that of the unconscious. One gains access to it by the path of truth (the analysand ventures to say what comes to mind, frankly and with no frills) when it comes to an end in jouissance (the analyst interprets what the analysand says in terms of libido).

However, two further paths bar access to this one: ignorance (to devote oneself to it with passion is always to consolidate established knowledge), and power (the passion for might obliterates what is revealed by parapraxes). Psychoanalysis teaches the virtues of powerlessness: this, at least, respects the real.

A wise lesson for an era, this era of ours, that has seen bureaucracy, arm in arm with science, dreaming of changing humankind in its deepest reaches - through propaganda, through direct manipulation of the brain, through biotechnology, and even through social engineering. Admittedly things were no better before, but tomorrow they could be far worse.

Jacques-Alain Miller