Doing that Freudian Thing: Six Readers Reading Jacques Lacan

Between October 1988 and July 1989, a reading group in Vancouver worked its way through s'Lacan Ecrits, in Alan Sheridan's translation. We all, I think, found the group extremely helpful in coming to terms with Lacan; from time to time, one or another of us would read a commentary on him, but we often found these less helpful. They surveyed the text from too Olympian an altitude to help us in our sentence-to-sentence struggle through it: they offered striking insights and ideas, but we often couldn't figure out exactly how they had drawn these from Lacan. They were also too conclusive. Lacan's texts are occasions for ongoing discussion, even ongoing dispute, rather than repositories of any meaning that could be placed beyond dispute (cf. Jameson , 170-71; Derrida , 420); the same could be said of all texts, but not always so confidently.

It occurred to me to write a study that would be closer to the experience of reading Lacan (to borrow a phrase from one of those Olympian surveys), that would analyse the process of interpretation rather than offering an interpretation as a product. I taped and transcribed a number of our discussions, chose one that seemed interesting, and wrote a commentary on it. I tried to pay close attention both to the text and to our discussion: to show the steps ascending from the letter of the text to such heights of speculation as we managed to scale. Since much of the discussion was concerned with temporality, I followed its temporal unfolding rather than rearranging it into an expository topography of my own.