Toward Reading Lacan: Pages for a Workbook: Chapter 5: The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud Chapter 6: On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis

This essay deserves a special place among the papers selected for this collection, partly because it articulates, more fully than any other single essay available to us here, Lacan's fundamental thesis that the unconscious is “structured like a language,” partly because it is slightly more readable than the rest. The reason for this (and Lacan almost apologizes for the fact) is that in its present form it finds a place midway between the genre of the spoken word and the genre of a written text.

Generally speaking, the genre of the spoken word for Lacan is more easily comprehensible by the auditor than the genre of the written text, which is intended to be read rather than heard. Editing the latter permits a “kind of tightening up” that Lacan likes “in order to leave the reader no other way out than the way in”—a way that Lacan prefers “to be difficult” (1977, p. 146/493). In this much, at least, he succeeds admirably! The present essay, though written down after it was delivered, happily escapes such strenuous redaction and retains some of the original rhythms (mesures) of the spoken word essential to shaping the response Lacan intends.

At any rate, the invitation to address the Fédération des étudiants es lettres offers an especially