Bøker av Jacques Lacan

"Fink's precise new translation makes this pivotal period in Lacan's thought more accessible to English speakers."-Publishers Weekly, starred review

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.

Jacques Lacan is one of the important thinkers of the 20th century and his work has revolutionized linguistics, philosophy, literature, psychology, cultural and media studies. This work is a transcript of his important lecture series. It includes readings of Sophocles' "Antigone" and Elizabethan courtly love poetry in relation to female sexuality.

Jacques Lacan's writings, and the seminars for which he has become famous, offer a radical reappraisal of the work of Freud. Focusing on psychological concepts developed by Freud, Lacan argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on a number of related topics.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

"'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.

When I decided to explore the question of Witz, or wit, with you this year, I undertook a small enquiry. It will come as no surprise at all that I began by questioning a poet.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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 agalma, the good object. I would go even further.

During the third year of his famous seminar, Jaques Lacan gives a concise definition of psychoanalysis. He focuses on grappling with the distinctions between neuroses and the psychoses and erects a structure for psychosis.

Revolutionary and innovative, Lacan's work lies at the epicenter of modern thought about otherness, subjectivity, sexual difference, and enjoyment.

A complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan gave in the course of a year's teaching within the training programme of the Societe Francaise de Psychanalyse. The French text was prepared by Jacques-Alain Miller in consultation with Jacques Lacan, from the transcriptions of the seminar.

Ecrits is the essential source for anyone who seeks to understand this seminal thinker and his influence on contemporary thought and culture.

In his famous lecture, Jacques Lacan re-examines the work of Freud and the experience of psychoanalysis in relation to ethics.

A major new translation of one of the most influential psychoanalytic works of modern times.

A startling psycholinguistic exploration of the boundaries of love and knowledge.