Changes

It would be fair to say that there are few twentieth century thinkers who have had such a far-reaching influence on subsequent intellectual life in the humanities as Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s ‘return to the meaning of Freud’ not only profoundly changed the institutional face of the psychoanalytic movement internationally. His seminars in the 1950’s were one of the formative environments of the currency of philosophical ideas that dominated French letters in the 1960’s and 70’s, and which has come to be known in the Anglophone world as ‘post-structuralism’. Both inside and outside of France, Lacan’s work has also been profoundly important in the fields of aesthetics, literary criticism and film theory. Through the work of Althusser (and more lately Ernesto Laclau, Jannis Stavrokakis and Slavoj Zizek), Lacanian theory has also left its mark on political theory, and particularly the analysis of ideology and institutional reproduction. This article, which seeks to outline something of the philosophical heritage and importance of Lacan’s theoretical work, is divided into four parts, each of which has subsections.

Within the world outside the humanities and critical theory, criticism of Lacan tends to dismiss him/his work in a more or less wholesale fashion. [[François Roustang]], in ''The Lacanian Delusion'', called Lacan's output "extravagant" and an "incoherent system of pseudo-scientific gibberish". In ''[[Fashionable Nonsense]]'' (1997), [[Alan Sokal]] and [[Jean Bricmont]] accuse Lacan of abusing scientific concepts. Defenders of Lacanian theories dispute the validity of such criticism, and point out that Sokal has explicitly stated that he does not understand Lacan's texts. According to Lacanians, the dismissal by Sokal and his allies precludes any valid criticism of his theories, and is instead motivated by a desire to "police the boundaries" of what constitutes an appropriate use of scientific terminology.

==Sources==

*[http://www.lacan.com/rolleyes.htm Chronology of Jacques Lacan]