Reading Lacan's Ecrits: From 'Overture to this Collection' to 'Presentation on Psychical Causality'

Editor : Calum Neill, Editor : Derek Hook, Editor : Stijn Vanheule

Reading Lacan's Ecrits: From 'Overture to this Collection' to 'Presentation on Psychical Causality'

Book Details

  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Published : February 2024
  • Cover : Paperback
  • Pages : 336
  • Category :
    Lacanian Psychoanalysis
  • Catalogue No : 97507
  • ISBN 13 : 9781032437378
  • ISBN 10 : 1032437375

Also by Derek Hook

Also by Calum Neill

Also by Stijn Vanheule

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Reading Lacan's Écrits is the first extensive set of commentaries on the complete edition of Lacan's Écrits to be published in English, providing an indispensable companion piece to some of Lacan's best-known but notoriously challenging writings.

With the contributions of some of the world's most renowned Lacanian scholars and analysts, Reading Lacan's Écrits encompasses a series of systematic, paragraph-by-paragraph commentaries which not only contextualise, explain and interrogate Lacan's arguments, but afford the reader multiple interpretive routes through the complete edition of Lacan's most labyrinthine of texts. Considering the significance of Écrits as a landmark in the history of psychoanalysis, this far-reaching and accessible guide will sustain and continue to animate critical engagement with one of the most challenging intellectual works of the twentieth century.

This series acts as an essential and incisive reference-text for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in training and in practice, as well as philosophers, cultural theorists and literary, social science and humanities researchers. This volume covers the first two sections of the Écrits, providing close readings of the first eight essays.

Reviews and Endorsements

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 some 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 is unreadable―it remains impenetrable if we just pick the thick volume up and start to read it. Hook, Neill and Vanheule 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 Hook, Neill and Vanheule'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 Žižek, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, global distinguished professor of German at New York University, professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School and senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana

These essays will be an invaluable resource not only for those approaching the Écrits for the first time but also for seasoned readers. Broad in scope yet following the detail of the text, they help guide us through Lacan's difficult prose, elucidating, contextualising and clarifying, and reminding us time and again of the precision, power and originality of his rethinking of psychoanalysis.
Darian Leader, psychoanalyst working in London and member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research

Table of Contents


1. Overture to this Collection
Calum Neill, Derek Hook and Stijn Vanheule

2. The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'
Kareen R. Malone and Christopher Reed Johnson

3. On My Antecedents
Derek Hook, John Dall'Aglio, Sinan Richards, Stijn Vanheule and Benjamin Strosberg

4. Beyond the 'Reality Principle'
David Pavón-Cuéllar

5. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
Calum Neill

6. Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis
Calum Neill and Tom Eyers

7. A Theoretical Introduction to the Functions of Psychoanalysis in Criminology
Carol Owens, with Michel Cenac

8. Presentation on Psychical Causality
Mattias Desmet

About the Editor(s)

Calum Neill is Associate Professor of Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory at Edinburgh Napier University and the Director of Lacan in Scotland.

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Derek Hook is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, USA, and a Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.

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Stijn Vanheule is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychoanalysis and Clinical Consulting at Ghent University, Belgium, and a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst in Private Practice. He is the author of multiple papers on Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic research into psychopathology, and clinical psychodiagnostics.

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