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Lacan was a singular (if often reluctant) teacher, full of contradictions: histrionic and self-effacing, precise and inscrutable, humorous and impatient, devoted and cynical, imperious and spontaneous (see, e.g. Dagfal, 2025; Nobus, 2023; Dorgeuille, 2007; Weiss, 2001; Roudinesco, 1986; Simpson, 1987). From informal meetings in his rue de Lille apartment to the packed amphitheaters of his seminars at Paris's Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital, École normale supérieure, and Université de droit, Lacan both mesmerized and mystified increasingly large audiences of students, trainees, colleagues, and other professionals for almost 30 years, from 1953 until 1980. They poured in ‘from all over the world’ – not only from the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry but also from virtually every humanities and social science discipline, clambering ‘on top of each other to see the great orator in the flesh’ (Adleman & Vanderwees, 2021, p. 204). One attendee describes Lacan's seminar as ‘a formidable seduction machine’ (Benvenuto, 2020, p. 2). Yet while he was often suave, flirtatious, and dazzlingly erudite, Lacan also ‘yelled and made noises, some of them scarcely human.’ He ‘imitated the cries and whistles of animals’ and emitted ‘guttural noises, chuckles, ruminations,’ letting ‘his body speak as much in its silences as in a gasp accompanying some histrionic gesticulation.’ He was ‘theatrical, ludic, [and] always inclined to invent the most exuberant figures of discourse’ (Roudinesco, 2011, p. 74) – ‘a teacher of rhetoric but not a teacher who relies on the university discourse’ (Adleman & Vanderwees, 2021, p. 223; see also, Lundberg, 2012).
Indeed, in their new book, The Lacanian Teacher, Nick Stock and Nick Peim highlight just how disruptive to the school's Symbolic Order – with its ‘formal educational discourses’ –Lacanian rhetoric could be (p. 25). They insist that ‘Lacan saw himself…as a teacher more than a writer’ (p. 7), noting that his career was ‘dominated by teaching