Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject.’ Edited by Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook, and Calum Neill. New York:  Routledge, 2019,  xxiv + 327 pp., $140.00 hardcover, $44.60 paperback.

This volume is the first of a projected series of three edited commentaries on the famous but seldom fully read Écrits of Jacques Lacan. He gave this title to thirty-four articles and lectures from various sources that were assembled as a book in 1966. Some were already well known to his followers; others were more obscure, all the more so as Lacan's prose was revealed as extremely difficult to decipher and its content replete with fragmentary references and allusions that would puzzle most readers, as he himself acknowledged. Muller and Richardson deserve credit for their pioneering guide to the Écrits published in 1982; that book introduced the work to a broader audience, although their scope was necessarily limited. Bruce Fink (2004) has published a reading of several of the essays. Although some had already been translated, the complete English version prepared by Fink did not appear until 2007. Of course, many discussions of Lacanian theory refer to parts of the Écrits. The current work, however, presents a unique attempt by scholars to place each of the articles in its historical and intellectual context, to make sense of the knotty prose as much as possible, and to offer interpretations of Lacan's intended meaning. I would judge the first two objectives eminently successful, while the third runs into the almost insurmountable obstacle of intentional ambiguity and linguistic playfulness that characterize most of Lacan's writings.