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Perhaps the great irony of Jacques Lacan, and the great source of frustration to his disclaimers, is that the French psychoanalyst's intricate, at times inscrutable, discourse should have gained so devoted a following. Lacan's works resist any inclination to encapsulate or definitively synthesize their meaning; and yet, these works—and the séminaires in which Lacan largely set them forth—exerted a kind of gravitational pull on French intellectual life, no less American academic life thereafter. If Lacan's discourse was not that of a master, as he claimed, nor even that of a proselytizer, how did he achieve such an audience?
In part, the answer lies in Lacan's very obscurity. After all, here were texts of such evasive punning and vertiginous reasoning that, in their wake, a hermeneutic cottage industry was virtually assured: exegeses were demanded and more than a few careers have been forged pursuing the Word. But the popularity of the séminaires themselves derive from more than interpretive fervor, and this is worth pointing out in order to understand the potential pitfalls of Dylan Evans's An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. In the 1970s, especially, once his séminaires had moved from the École Normale Supérieure to the Faculté de Droit, Lacan drew a remarkable mixture of intellectuals and Parisian society which, by American standards, is perhaps without comparison. None of our intellectual flashpoints—Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Alan Bloom, Camille Paglia—acquired the sense of fashion that surrounded Lacan, and yet his was not simply a cult of personality. Even as his séminaires may have been, obliquely, “advertisements for himself,” what's remarkable is that these luminous and peripatetic monologues consistently undermined the idea of a coherent “self.” Around this aporia, then, no fanaticism