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This slim volume, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law, who has been editing the Seminars, consists of three brief talks Lacan gave in 1967 at separate locations in France. Two of them were previously unpublished; the other appeared in print in 1981, the year Lacan died. We may wonder what moved the editor to publish them now (the French edition appeared in 2005). The context back in 1967 included the recent publication of Lacan's substantial volume of writings, titled simply Écrits (1966); the first major conference on structuralism in America, held at Johns Hopkins in 1966; the publication of major works by Foucault (The Order of Things) and Derrida (Of Grammatology); and the appearance of a much-copied cartoon in a French periodical showing the “structuralists”—Lacan, Foucault, Barthes, and Lévi-Strauss—sitting under a palm tree. These things are evidently on Lacan's mind as he gives these three talks—but why should they concern us now, more than forty years later? Lacan provides a guide to the reader when he reminds us that he resurrected Freud's notion of Nachträglichkeit, defined here as