The man presented himself as a voice… He had something to say. He said it.

Why read Lacan? Why even read a review of his work? Let me begin with some answers to easier questions.

These two volumes are the most readable works in the English language by Jacques Lacan. Their availability is a potential boon to initiated and uninitiated readers alike (assuming, for the moment, that Lacan is worth reading at all). They comprise masterfully translated, edited transcripts of two years' of the public seminar Lacan conducted annually from 1953 until the year before his death at age 80 in 1981. Prior to the publication of these volumes, only a single entire year-long seminar transcript had been available in English (Seminar XI, ; see Lacan, 1978), along with versions of isolated single seminars from 1959, 1966, and 1975. These facts by themselves tell us that the dissemination of Lacan's thought into the English-language world can be much enhanced by the publication of these long-awaited records. This event is the result of a collaboration between Lacan himself, his heir-apparent and son-in-law, Jacques-Alain Miller, and the translators John Forrester and Sylvana Tomaselli. Though delayed by legal wrangles over the unauthorized availability of pirated transcripts,