Talk:Écrits

Until the publication of hisÉcrits (Writings), Jacques Lacan's only published book was his doctoral thesis in medicine, De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalité (On paranoid psychosis in its relations with personality; 1932), written from a psychiatric, rather than psychoanalytic, perspective.

In the 1960s Lacan was asked by several of his students and by his friend François Wahl, of the publishing house Seuil, to collect his writings in a single volume. The considerable success of De...

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Lacan only published one book in his lifetime - Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), and oversaw the editing of the first of his seminars - Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). The English translation, Écrits: A Selection by Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977) contains key texts such as "The Mirror Stage", "The Rome Discourse," "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," "The Meaning of the Phallus" and "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire," but it still only consists of one-third of the French edition.

Lacan was 65 years old when he published Écrits and it is not an introductory text but the summation of a lifetime's teaching and clinical practice. Each paper contains a multiplicity of allusions and references that need to be unpacked, if we are to begin understanding Lacan's ideas.

"The Mirror Stage," for example, is only seven pages long, while "The Signification of the Phallus" is just nine, but each of these papers has generated volumes of explication, critique and applications.

==more==Reading as the production of meaning In this chapter I want to draw all the threads of the previous chapters together. I will do this by giving an exposition of some of the key themes contained in Lacan's Ecrits.! As this chapter contains many ideas already discussed in earlier sections of the book, it provides an opportunity for revision and a reconsideration of important topics such as: the significance of the mirror phase; the nature of the id and the ego; reasons for the rejection of egopsychology; the meaning of the terms signifier and signified, metaphor and metonymy; and Lacan's concept of desire. The first point to note about these writings is that they were almost all given as 'speeches', addresses to meetings of psychoanalysts. In them Lacan is trying to persuade the experts to listen to him. Lacan's seminars, on the other hand, although presented orally, aim at teaching students how to read the text of Freud.2 Second, it should be noted that Ecrits, a colle~tion of 'articles', is not theoretically o,r epistemologically homogeneous. Almost one thousand pages in the original French, the product of some thirty years of research, it has a monolithic reputation. The book is extraordinarily difficult to read for many reasons. It is said that these 'writings' are a rebus. A rebus, like a dream, is a sort of picture-puzzle which looks like nonsense but, when separated into elements and interpreted, makes sense. Lacan's writings are a rebus because his style mimics the subject matter. He not only' explicates the unconscious but strives to imitate it. The unconscious becomes not only the subject matter but, in the grammatical sense, the subject, the speaker of the discourse. Lacan believes that language speaks the subject, that the speaker is subjected to language rather than master of it. 80

! Lacan's Ecrits: A review 81 When I am reading Ecrits, Roland Barthes's distinction between the readerly (lisible) and the writerly (scriptible) text often comes to mind.3 Barthes makes a distinction between two sorts of writers. The lesser sort is the ecrivant, for whom language is the means to some extra-linguistic end. S/he is a transitive writer in that s/he has a direct object. The other sort of writer, the ecrivain, writes intransitively in so far as s/he devotes attention to the means, which is language, instead of the end. While the ecrivant produces a Work; the ecrivain produces a Text. Texts are scriptible because the reader, as it were, rewrites them as s/he reads. Works, on the other hand, are lisible or readable; we do not rewrite them but simply read them from start to finish. We proceed horizontally through a Work, but vertically, if that is possible, through a Text. In short, the readable (lisible) text is merchandise to be consumed; such a text moves inevitably and irreversibly to an end, to the disclosure of ~hat has been concealed. The writable (scriptible) text requires the production of meanings, the active participation of the reader. Barthes has said that the goal of literary work is to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text. It seems to me that when we are reading Ecrits we can no longer be passive consun"lers. We must contribute something; we must produce meaning. It could be argued that Lacan is to some extent working within a French literary tradition. His debt to the surrealist movement is particularly noticeable. Lacan's style, as I said earlier, owes much to Andre Breton, one of the leaders of surrealism. The style is further convoluted by the use of punning and, in the later work, there are many Joycean puns which are untranslatable. It has been said that his texts are so organised as to prevent skim-reading. There are' other difficulties. The architecture of Ecrits is such that it almost impossible to trace the development or history of the concepts deployed; chronology is in effect abolished. Ecrits contains an index raisonne compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller, in which the user is instructed to look, not for words, but for concepts, the implication being that they remain theoretically (and epistemologically) the same from 1936 to 1966. And so the concepts of the 1960s appear to exist in texts written before the Second World War. In other words, a fundamental assumption of unity and systematicity transforms Ecrits into a conceptually homogeneous text rather than a collection of papers written over a 82 Jacques Lacan considerable period of time, with all the shifts and modifications that implies.4 . Somebody once said the Ecrits seem to put the reader through an experience analogous to analysis: complete with passion, desire to know, transference. The Ecrits seem designed to force the reader into a perpetual struggle. An analysis terminates only when the patient realises it could go on for ever. Perhaps the reader of Lacan's work should be prepared for an unending struggle rather like the analytic patient's?