Reading Lacan’s Autres Écrits: Sections I and II

Jacques Lacan’s Autres Écrits, compiled by Jacques Alain Miller for Lacan’s centennial, remains untranslated as a complete volume in English, though many individual pieces are available. This book begins a series offering a thoroughcommentary on the collection.This first volume in the series covers the first two sections of the collection. Section I consists of two very different pieces, each of which, in rather different ways, serves as an introduction to the Autres Écrits. First, we haveJacques Alain Miller’s prologue, which provides something of a context for the collection as a whole, while also constituting a curious post-Lacanian artefact in its own right. This is followed by ‘Lituraterre’, a later piece by Lacanthat considers the function of writing and literary creation, thus providing something of a conceptual framework to the collection qua collection of written works. Section II consists of early Lacanian texts, and the commentaries here provide a fascinating and important insight into Lacan’s thinking from the 1930s and 1940s, allowing us to position these early writings in the broader context of Lacan’s oeuvre.This commentary provides invaluable support for Anglophone readers of Lacan, including psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, historians of ideas, and anyone curious to access some of Lacan’s less well-known texts in English.