Kid A In Alphabet Land
Kid A In Alphabet Land
An abecedarian roller-coaster ride through the phallocentric obscurantism of Jacques Lacan.
Kid A In Alphabet Land is an illustrated, alphabet-driven exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis created by writer and early web pioneer Carl Steadman, with illustrations by Andra Brubaker. Conceived in the early 1990s, the project translates some of the most difficult concepts in twentieth-century theory into a sequence of hyperlinked “cards,” one for each letter of the alphabet.
Rather than offering definitions or summaries, the series stages conceptual encounters. Each letter introduces a term—Act, Gaze, Real, Thing, and so on—not as settled knowledge, but as an experience. Readers are encouraged to begin anywhere, to wander, to misrecognize, and to return.
Warning: This project contains psychoanalysis and therefore contains language.
Clarity is not guaranteed.
How to read this
Kid A In Alphabet Land is not a glossary and not a textbook. Each letter presents a psychoanalytic concept as a situation rather than an explanation.
You may read alphabetically, begin anywhere, follow links outward, or return repeatedly to the same entry. Understanding is not cumulative. Disorientation is expected.
Download the complete set
A complete offline version of the project is available here:
Download the complete Kid A In Alphabet Land set
Index (A–Z)
Historical note. Kid A In Alphabet Land was created in the early 1990s by Carl Steadman, with illustrations by Andra Brubaker. It later acquired a minor mythological afterlife following Radiohead’s 2000 album Kid A, though no direct connection exists. The project remains a distinctive artifact of early internet theory culture.
Visual appendix
Original source