Recommendations
Books Like Écrits by Jacques Lacan
Works that enter the unconscious from the outside
Lacan shows that the unconscious is not a depth beneath the surface but a structure — like a language — that the subject inhabits from the outside in. These works share that same reversal: the interior is exterior, the subject is constituted rather than constituting.
- 1Buy on Amazon
Le Séminaire XI
by Jacques Lacan
The Four Fundamental Concepts — the most accessible Lacan Seminar; the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive; the best entry into Lacan after a general introduction
- 2Buy on Amazon
Le Séminaire VII
by Jacques Lacan
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis — the most philosophically rich seminar; Antigone, Das Ding, the ethics of the real; essential for understanding the relationship between Lacan and continental philosophy
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Buy on AmazonL'Être et le néant
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Being and Nothingness — the existentialist counterpart; Sartre's theory of the subject as constituting consciousness vs. Lacan's subject constituted by language; the great French theoretical opposition
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Buy on AmazonTristes Tropiques
by Claude Lévi-Strauss
The structural anthropology that Lacan drew on for his reading of the Oedipus complex as a kinship structure; the shared structuralist method in its most accessible form
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Buy on AmazonSurveiller et punir
by Michel Foucault
The power/knowledge counterpart — Foucault analyzes institutions where Lacan analyzes the subject; both show that the subject is produced rather than pre-given; the essential companion in French theory
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Buy on AmazonThe Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund Freud
The foundational text — Lacan's 'return to Freud' begins here; reading Freud alongside Lacan shows both what Lacan inherits and what he transforms through the structural linguistic re-reading
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Buy on AmazonDe la grammatologie
by Jacques Derrida
Of Grammatology — Derrida's deconstruction of the logocentric tradition; the post-structuralist development from the same structuralist starting point as Lacan, in a different direction
- 8Buy on Amazon
Encore: Le Séminaire XX
by Jacques Lacan
The late feminist Lacan — sexuation, jouissance, the not-all; the Lacan that Irigaray, Kristeva, and feminist theory both drew on and critiqued
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