Écrits

Introduction

The volume of almost 900 pages, published in Paris in 1966, collects papers and lectures Lacan had written over three decades, from a first version of “The Mirror Stage” presented in 1936 to the 1960s. It opens out of chronological order with his seminar on Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter”. Other key texts are the “Rome Discourse” of 1953 on the function of speech and language in psychoanalysis, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious” (1957) and “The Subversion of the Subject”. Despite its notorious difficulty the book sold well and made Lacan a central figure of structuralism. A complete English translation appeared only in 2006.

Connections

Builds on

• Phenomenology of Spirit1807 · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• The Interpretation of Dreams1900 · Sigmund Freud
• Course in General Linguistics1916 · Ferdinand de Saussure

Taken up in

• Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses1970 · Louis Althusser
• Revolution in Poetic Language1974 · Julia Kristeva
• The Sublime Object of Ideology1989 · Slavoj Žižek
• Less Than Nothing2012 · Slavoj Žižek

Criticized in

• Anti-Oedipus1972 · Gilles Deleuze
• This Sex Which Is Not One1977 · Luce Irigaray
• Gender Trouble1990 · Judith Butler