Routledge Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject’

The Écrits was Jacques Lacan’s single most important text, a landmark in psychoanalysis which epitomized his aim of returning to Freud via structural linguistics, philosophy and literature. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan’s Écrits to be published in English. An invaluable document in the history of psychoanalysis, and one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century, Lacan’s Écrits still today begs the interpretative engagement of clinicians, scholars, philosophers and cultural theorists. The three volumes of Reading Lacan’s Écrits offer just this: a series of systematic paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries – by some of the world’s most renowned Lacanian analysts and scholars – on the complete edition of the Écrits, inclusive of lesser known articles such as ‘Kant with Sade’, ‘The Youth of Gide’, ‘Science and Truth’, ‘Presentation on Transference’ and ‘Beyond the "Reality Principle". The originality and importance of Lacan’s Écrits to psychoanalysis and intellectual history is matched only by the text’s notorious inaccessibility. Reading Lacan’s Écrits is an indispensable companion piece and reference-text for clinicians and scholars exploring Lacan's magnum opus. Not only does it contextualize, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments, it provides multiple interpretative routes through this most labyrinthine of texts. Reading Lacan’s Écrits provides an incisive and accessible companion for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers who wish to draw upon Lacan’s pivotal work. Review "It all began with an improbable wager: ask 35 scholars to each write something intelligible about every single paragraph in one of the texts included in Jacques Lacan's magnum opus, Écrits, so as to generate a commentary on the entire 800-page volume. And yet, after years of preparation, the wager has paid off: we have here useful and at times brilliant examples of textual explication! Cryptic formulations are lucidly unpacked, and mysterious references are provided, giving the serious reader myriad keys to fascinating texts"-Bruce Fink, translator of Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English "Let’s face it: Lacan’s Écrits, one of the classical texts of modern thought are unreadable - they remain impenetrable if we just pick the thick volume up and start to read it. Vanheule, Hook and Neill provide what we were all waiting for: a detailed commentary which does not aim to replace reading Écrits but to render it possible. The three volumes do wonder, their effect is no less than magic: when, after getting stuck at a particularly dense page of Écrits, we turn to the corresponding pages in the commentary and then return to the page of Écrits which pushed us to madness, the same lines appear in all the clarity of their line of thought. It is thus a safe prediction that Vanheule, Hook and Neill's commentary will become a kind of permanent companion of the English translation of Écrits, indispensable for everyone who wants to find her or his way in its complex texture."-Slavoj Zizek "Lacan’s teaching is notoriously hard to access and comprehend. But this is done on purpose: to understanding the psyche, the subject and its interaction with socio-political reality cannot be a piecemeal operation. One needs to take into account the paradoxical and often counterintuitive effects of unconscious mechanisms, and of the extimate operation of the real within and beyond the symbolic and the imaginary. Coupling exegesis with multi-level interpretations, the numerous texts in this volume advance a commentary, both informative and suggestive, that will immensely help readers navigate the archipelago of the Lacanian Écrits, without reducing in the least their complexity and inspirational value, withou