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I highly recommend Reading Lacan's Écrits: From ‘Signification of the Phallus’ to ‘Metaphor of the Subject‘—the third of three volumes studying each text entry of the Écrits, edited by Stijn Vanheule, Derek Hook, and Calum Neill—to readers already familiar to some degree with Lacan's work. Each of the chapters, written by invited authors, examines one of the last eleven entries in the Écrits. Each author presents contextual material situating the entry within Lacan's work, followed by commentary formatted as a high-power microscope: a paragraph-by-paragraph, even line-by-line examination of the text. The series is not, in my opinion, a good choice for readers seeking an introduction to the Écrits, much less an imaginary “right answer” to the question of what the Lacanian model “is” and what each entry in the Écrits is “about.”
A back-cover blurb by Slavoj Žižek states, “Let's face it: Lacan's Écrits, one of the classic texts of modern thought, are unreadable—they remain so if we just pick the thick volume up and start to read it.” The editors take these difficulties as the main topic of their introduction, stating in their second sentence that the Écrits are “baroque, intimidating, [and] ever elusive. … Rather than the Rosetta Stone that enables the unlocking of other obscure writings, Lacan's Écrits is far more akin to a literary Babel. … [It] is not a book; it is a type of infinite text; it does not end, it cannot be finished; it continues to escape the ‘imaginarization’ of our attempts at assimilation” (pp. xvii, xx). The editors thereby express every reader's and writer's response when attempting to read or write about Lacan, and their introductory warning has been given before in earlier studies of the Écrits. For example, this volume contains commentary by Fabio Vighi on “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic
of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” one of the most important essays in the Écrits. Van Haute (2002) wrote an entire book on this entry,