Lacan’s Écrits

“Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter'”
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Compete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc.  New York 2006.
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York  2002.
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York 1977.
    Secondary Sources
  • The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (1988)  Edited by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson.  The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London.
  • “The purloined letter” (1956) Chapter 5 in The Works of Jacques Lacan: an Introduction.  By Bice Benvenuto and Roger Kennedy.  St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1986.
  • “Strength in Letters: “The Purloined Letter” (2011)  Chapter 3 in Lacanian Psychotherapy: Theory and Practical Applications.  By Michael J. Miller.  Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group, New York, London.
    “The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis” 1955 and later
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc.  New York 2006.
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York  2002.
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York 1977.
    • Secondary Sources
    • Boothby, Richard (2001) Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Freud.  Routledge, New York and London.
    • Julien, Philippe (1994) Jacques Lacan’s Return to Freud: The Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary.  Translated by Devre Beck Simiu. New York University Press, New York and London.
    • Schneiderman, Stuart (Editor) (1980) Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan. Yale University Press, New Haven, London.
    Questions from reading:”The Freudian Thing or the Meaning of the Return to Freud in Psychoanalysis”
        1. Whose (what) voices is it when the various quotation marks appear? What does Lacan achieve with this rhetorical writing strategy?
        2. Discuss the notion of the “cunning of reason” in the way Lacan grapples with it?
        3. What is Truth? Is it the Freudian Thing?
        4. Discuss: “The ego is a means of the speech addressed to you from the subject’s unconscious, a weapon for resisting its recognition; it is fragmented when it conveys speech and whole when it serves not to hear it.” (p. 355)
        5. Exactly how is the analyst acting as the ‘dummy’ (in the position of the big Other) to maintain this role and not to fall into the trap of the imaginary (using the L schema as the reference)?
    “The Instance of the Letter or Reason Since Freud”
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc.  New York, 2006.
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York  2002
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York 1977.
    • Secondary Sources
  • Benvenuto, Bice and Roger Kennedy (1956) “The instance of the letter”. Chapter 6 in The Works of Jacques Lacan: an Introduction. St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1986.
  • Fink, Bruce (2004) Reading “The Instance of the letter in the unconscious”, in Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London. 63-105.
    Questions from reading: “Kant with Sade”

    1. The Freudian conception of the moral conflict is the clash between “civilized morality” and “amoral sexual drives” (Evans 1996, 56). However, Lacan seems to suggest that the Freudian unconscious (the agent of irrational drives and desires) is not qualitatively different from the Cartesian and Kantian transcendental cogito (the rational, self-reflexive, detached agent of reason). Rather, the two are different sides of the same ethical coin. This suggests that one can always ethically justify one’s actions, regardless of how benevolent or diabolic these actions might be.
    In the light of this it is worth asking: How can we re-conceptualize ethics in the light of Lacan’s radical revision of the moral dilemma? What is ethical and unethical today? Are ethics always political, relevant to one’s subjective position? Is it possible for a vile, diabolic action to be ethical (for example, is it ethical to brutally torture in order to prevent terrorism)? Does a universal ethical position exist?

    [ This question is heavily reliant on Zizek’s interpretation of “Kant with Sade”,
    Kant and Sade, Ideal Couple
    [For the citation above, See Evans, Dylan. 1996. “An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis”. New York: Routledge]
    2. Discuss: “Reciprocity – a relation that is reversible since it is established along a simple line that unites two subjects who, due to their “reciprocal” position consider this relation to be equivalent – is difficult to situate as the logical time of any sort of breakthrough franchissement) on the subject’s part in his relation to the signifier, and far less still as a step in any sort of development,…”P.649.
    3. Lacan and Zizek seem obsessed with such a shocking combination; Kant! With Sade! How clever we are to see that both are sexual and human. There are no limits on freedom. My question is, So what?
    4. This écrit seems to be a philosophical rant, with Lacan using Kant/Sade on which to hang his ideas, while having only marginal application to psychoanalysis.
    5. Fink suggests (p. 832) that $<>a can be read backwards and forwards: the object desires the subject and the subject desires the object. Discuss.
    6. Is Lacan’s interest aimed at de-centering our perceptions of behaviours in order to reveal the inherent paradoxes revolving around pleasure?
“The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”. Published 1966.
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc.  New York, 2006.
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York  2002
  • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: A Selection, translated by Alan Sheridan. W.W.Norton & Company Inc. New York 1977.
    • Secondary Sources
  • Benvenuto, Bice and Roger Kennedy (1986) The Works of Jacques Lacan: An Introduction. St. Martin’s Press, New York 165-182.
  • Fink, Bruce (2004) Reading “The Subversion of the Subject”, in Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely.  University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London.  106-128.
  • Fink, Bruce (2004) “The Lacanian Phallus and the Square Root of Negative One”, in  Lacan to the Letter: Reading Écrits Closely.  University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London. 129-140.
  • Muller, John P. and William Richardson (1982) Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to the Écrits. International Universities Press, Inc. New York. 355-414.
  • Pluth, Ed (2006) Lacan’s subversion of the subject. Continental Philosophy Review 39: 293-312.
  • Van Haute, Philippe (2002) Against Adaptation: Lacan’s “Subversion of the Subject”.  Translated by Paul Crowe and Miranda Vankerk.  Other Press, New York.
    “Position of the Unconscious”. Published 1964.
    • Found in Jacques Lacan: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink.  W.W.Norton & Company Inc.  New York, 2006.
    • Found in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Editors: Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus. State University of New York Press, 1995. 259-282.
      Secondary Sources
    • Gueguen, Pierre-Gilles (1999) Discretion of the analyst in the post-interpretative era. From Psychoanalytical Notebooks 2, 1999 – The Unconscious. http://www.londonsociety-nls.org.uk/PGG_discretion.htm
    • Heath, Stephen (2010) Notes on Suture. From The Symptom; Online Journal for Lacan.com http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/heath8.html
    • Soler, Colette (2012) The body in the teaching of Jacques Lacan. Translated by Lindsay Watson.
      http://jcfar.org/past_papers/The%20Body%20in%20the%20Teaching%20of%20Jacques%20Lacan%20-%20Colette%20Soler.pdf
“Science and Truth” Published 1965.
Secondary Sources
  • Fink, Bruce, (1995) Science and Psychoanalysis, in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Editors: Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, Maire Jaanus. State University of New York Press. 55-64.  
  • Fink, Bruce (1995) Psychoanalysis and Science, Section 10 in The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey. 138-146.