Reading Lacan's Écrits

'It all began with an improbable wager: ask 35 scholars to each write something intelligible about every single paragraph in one of the texts included in Jacques Lacan's magnum opus, Écrits, so as to generate a commentary on the entire 800-page volume. And yet, after years of preparation, the wager has paid off: we have here useful and at times brilliant examples of textual explication! Cryptic formulations are lucidly unpacked, and mysterious references are provided, giving the serious reader myriad keys to fascinating texts'.

Bruce Fink, translator of Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (2006)

'Let’s face it: Lacan’s Écrits, one of the classical texts of modern thought are unreadable - they remain impenetrable if we just pick the thick volume up and start to read it. Hook, Neill and Vanheule provide what we were all waiting for: a detailed commentary which does not aim to replace reading Écrits but to render it possible. The three volumes do wonder, their effect is no less than magic: when, after getting stuck at a particularly dense page of Écrits, we turn to the corresponding pages in the commentary and then return to the page of Écrits which pushed us to madness, the same lines appear in all the clarity of their line of thought. It is thus a safe prediction that Hook, Neill and Vanheule's commentary will become a kind of permanent companion of the English translation of Écrits, indispensable for everyone who wants to find her or his way in its complex texture'.

Slavoj Žižek

'Like a Rosetta stone, this accessible and superbly-written collection superimposes three levels of translation that render legible a text that Lacan quipped was not meant to be read. Cracking the code of Lacanian hieroglyphics, we discover the genealogy of his thought. These exceptionally fresh and user-friendly approaches testify to the enduring relevance and urgency of his opus magnum'.

Patricia Gherovici, psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference (Routledge, 2017).

'These essays will be an invaluable resource not only for those approaching Écrits for the first time but also for seasoned readers. Broad in scope yet following the detail of the text, they help guide us through Lacan’s difficult prose, elucidating, contextualizing and clarifying, and reminding us time and time again of the precision, power and originality of his rethinking of psychoanalysis'.

Darian Leader