This collection offers the first sustained, in-depth commentary on Seminar XX, Encore, considered the cornerstone of Lacan's work on the themes of sexual difference, knowledge, jouissance, and love. Although Seminar XX was originally popularized as Lacan's treatise on feminine sexuality, these essays, by some of today's foremost Lacanian scholars, go beyond feminine sexuality to address Lacan's significant intertwining concern with the rupture between reality and the real produced by modern science, and the implications of this rupture for subjectivity, knowledge, jouissance, and the body. The essays clarify basic concepts, but for readers already familiar with Lacan they also offer sophisticated workings-through of the more challenging and obscure arguments in Encore—both by tracing their historical development across Lacan's œuvre and by demonstrating their relation to particular philosophical, theological, mathematical, and scientific concepts. They cover much of the terrain necessary for understanding sexual difference—not in terms of chromosomes, body parts, choice of sexual partner, or varieties of sexual practice—but in terms of one's position vis-à-vis the Other and the kind of jouissance one is able to obtain. In so doing, they make significant interventions in the debates regarding sex, gender, and sexuality in feminist theory, philosophy, queer theory, and cultural studies.

In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. These essays, by some of the finest analysts and writers in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today, carefully lay out the background and development of Lacan's thought. In Part I, Jacques-Alain Miller spells out the philosophical and psychiatric origins of Lacan's work in great detail. In Parts II, III, and IV, Colette Soler, Eric Laurent, and others explain in the clearest of fashions the highly influential conceptualization Lacan introduces with the terms "symbolic," "imaginary," and "real." Part V provides the first sustained account in English to date of Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalytic diagnostic categories--neurosis, perversion, psychosis, and their subcategories--their theoretical foundations, and clinical applications (ample case material is provided here.) Parts VI and VII of this collection take us well beyond Seminars I and II, relating Lacan's early work to his later views of the 1960s and 1970s. Slavoj Zizek explores the complex philosophical relations between Hegel and Lacan regarding the subject and the cause. And Lacan's article, "On Freud's 'Trieb' and the Psychoanalyst's Desire"--that appears here for the first time in English and is brilliantly unpacked by Jacques-Alain Miller in his "Commentary on Lacan's Text"--takes a giant step forward to 1965 where we see a crucial reversal in Lacan's perspective: desire is suddenly devalued, the defensive, inhibiting nature of desire coming to the fore. "What then becomes essential is the drive as an activity related to the lost object that produces jouissance."

This is the first collection of essays to offer a comprehensive analysis of, and reflection on, the major themes emergent in Jacques Lacan’s seminars of 1955-56 and 1956-57: Seminar IV – the object relation, and Seminar V – formations of the unconscious. Assessing the value of a clinical approach orientated around the question of the object lack in the contemporary clinic, the book comprises 16 chapters which follow the development of a range of concepts elaborated by Lacan in these seminars, including sustained engagement with his critique of object relations theory. It considers the effectiveness of these early ideas in clinical practice in relation to hysteria, phobia, fetishism, obsessional neurosis, and of the so-called "Borderline" case. Lacan’s early concepts are also subjected to critique for engagement with Queer theory, and research in asexuality or the operation(s) of the signifier Phallus. The chapters build to provide an invaluable resource to interpret and evaluate Lacan’s early teaching, and to find in his early concepts a fresh utility and scope for both clinical work and psychoanalytic research and enquiry. The book will be of great interest to Lacanian scholars and students, as well as psychoanalytic therapists, and analysts interested in Lacan’s early work.

This book provides the first truly sustained commentary to appear in either French or English on Lacan's most important seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The 16 contributors unpack Lacan's notoriously difficult work in simple terms, and supply elegant illustrations from a variety of fields: psychoanalytic treatment, film, literature, art, and so on. Each of Lacan's fundamental concepts--the unconscious, transference, drive, and repetition--is discussed in detail, and related to other important notions such as object a cause of desire, the gaze, the Name-of-the-Father, the subject, and the Other. This volume also includes a translation of Lacan's companion piece to Seminar XI, "Position of the Unconscious" (an article from the French edition of the Ecrits that has never before appeared in English), by one of the foremost translators of Lacan's work, Bruce Fink. As an indication of the important of this article, Lacan considered it to be the sequel to his "Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," arguably his most important paper in the 1950s. The contributors include many of the best minds in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today. Chapters include "Excommunication: Context and Concepts" by Jacques-Alain Miller, "The Subject and the Other I and II" by Colette Soler, "Alienation and Separation I and II" by Eric Laurent, "Science and Psychoanalysis" by Bruce Fink, "The Name-of-the-Father" by Francois Regnault, "Transference as Deception" by Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, "The Drive I and II" by Marie-Hele`ne Brousse, "The Demontage of the Drive" by Maire Jaanus, "The Gaze as an Object" by Antonio Quinet, "The Phallic Gaze of Wonderland" by Richard Feldstein, "The 'Evil Eye' of Painting: Jacques Lacan and Witold Gombrowicz on the Gaze" by Hanjo Berressem, "Art and the Position of the Analyst" by Robert Samuels, "The Relation between Voice and the Gaze" by Ellie Ragland, "The Lamella of David Lynch" by Slavoj Zizek, "The Real Cause of Repetition" by Bruce Fink, "Introductory Talk at Sainte-Anne Hospital" by Jacques-Alain Miller, and "The End of Analysis I and II" by Anne Dunand.

The second volume in the Studying Lacan’s Seminars series, this book is the first comprehensive study of Lacan’s Seminar VI: Desire and its Interpretation. A natural companion to Bruce Fink’s recent translation of the seminar into English (2019), this book offers a genuine opportunity to delve deeply into the seminar, and a hospitable introduction to Lacan’s teachings of the 1950s. This important book brings together various aspects of Cox Cameron’s teachings and systematic, careful, and critical readings of Seminar VI. Lacan’s theorizing and conceptualizing of the object a, the fundamental fantasy, and aphanisis, as well as the ambiguous treatment of the phallus in his work at the time, are all introduced, contextualized, and explored in detail. The trajectories of his thinking are traced in terms of future developments and elaborations in the seminars that follow closely on the heels of Seminar VI – Seminars VII (Ethics of Psychoanalysis), VIII (Transference), IX (Identification), and X (Anxiety). Consideration is also given to how certain themes and motifs are recapitulated or reworked in his later teachings such as in Seminars XX (Encore), and XXIII (The Sinthome). Also included in this volume are two further essays by Cox Cameron, a most valuable critique of the concept of the phallus in Lacan’s theories of the 1950s, and an overview of Seminar VI originally presented as a keynote address to the APW congress in Toronto 2014. The book is of great interest to Lacanian scholars and students, as well as psychoanalytic therapists and analysts interested in Lacan’s teachings of the 1950s and in how important concepts developed during this period are treated in his later work.

In his psycholinguistic exploration of the relationship between the desire for love and the attainment of knowledge, Jacques Lacan leads into an new way of interpreting the two most fundamental human drives.

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