Lacan in 90 Minutes/Late Lacan

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By the late 1960s, Lacan had begun to push against the very frameworks that had made his work influential. Structural explanations, he believed, clarified much—but they also created new illusions of mastery. Meaning could be mapped, systems described, relations formalized. Yet something continued to resist understanding.

Lacan’s later teaching emerged from this dissatisfaction. It did not abandon earlier insights so much as test their limits.

When Structure Is Not Enough

Structural approaches excel at showing how elements relate to one another. But for Lacan, psychoanalysis was not only about relations and systems. It was also about breakdowns—points where meaning fails, repetitions persist, and explanation stalls.

In clinical practice, interpretation does not always resolve a symptom. In speech, understanding does not guarantee change. These impasses were not accidents. They were central to what psychoanalysis confronted.

Lacan’s later work increasingly focused on these limits.

A New Style of Teaching

As Lacan’s questions shifted, so did his style. The seminars became more formal, more experimental, and often more difficult to follow. Diagrams, formulas, and unusual metaphors appeared—not as decorative flourishes, but as attempts to say something that ordinary language could not easily capture.

This was not a turn toward abstraction for its own sake. Lacan was searching for ways to think about experiences that resisted narrative explanation: repetition, fixation, and the persistence of suffering despite insight.

Many listeners found this phase challenging, even alienating. Others saw it as the most honest expression of psychoanalysis’s limits.

Risk Without Guarantee

Lacan did not offer reassurance that his later teaching would cohere into a unified theory. On the contrary, he often emphasized that psychoanalysis had no final answers—only better questions.

This refusal of closure distinguished Lacan sharply from thinkers who sought comprehensive systems. His work increasingly foregrounded failure, impossibility, and inconsistency—not as defects, but as realities psychoanalysis must face.

For readers encountering Lacan for the first time, this phase can feel forbidding. But it also clarifies something essential: Lacan was not interested in producing doctrines to be applied. He was interested in sustaining inquiry where certainty breaks down.

Divisions Among Followers

Lacan’s later turn intensified divisions even among those sympathetic to his work. Some readers gravitated toward his earlier, more structural formulations. Others followed him into increasingly formal and experimental territory.

These disagreements persist today. There is no single “late Lacan” that commands consensus. What unites these divergent readings is a shared recognition that Lacan refused to settle.

An Open Ending

Lacan’s teaching did not culminate in a final synthesis. It ended, instead, with an unfinished project—one that invites continuation, misreading, and debate.

This openness is part of Lacan’s legacy. His work does not ask to be mastered. It asks to be engaged.

The final page of this series considers what remains of Lacan after his death—and why his work continues to provoke, inspire, and divide readers across disciplines.

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