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 thorough commentary on the collection. This first volume in the series covers the first two sections of the collection. 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 and seek to position these early writings in the broader context of Lacan’s oeuvre. Section I consists of two very different pieces which each, in rather different ways, serve as introductions to the Autres Écrits. First we have Jacques 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 Lacan which considers the function of writing and literary creation and thus provides something of a conceptual framework to the collection qua collection of written works. This commentary provides an invaluable support for Anglophone readers of Lacan, including psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, historians of ideas, and anyone curious to access many of Lacan’s less well known texts in English.