“—What do Americans want?—I have the answer! A partial answer. They want Slavoj Zizek! They want the Lacan of Slavoj Zizek.”

Jacques-Alain Miller on Slavoj Žižek:

“So you remember that Freud asked himself the famous question, “What do women want?” As a man, he asked himself this question; and perhaps as a woman too. We do not have the answer, in spite of thirty years of Lacan’s teaching. We tried. So it’s not a discriminating question. I have another question, which has been troubling me for years, which is —What do Americans want?—I have the answer! A partial answer. They want Slavoj Zizek! They want the Lacan of Slavoj Zizek. They like it better than the Lacan of the Freudian Field, for the time being perhaps. The question is, do they want very definite concepts? Or do they want some room to wrangle? Some negotiating space? And that is the case with the concepts of psychoanalysis.”

from Ordinary Psychosis lacanian ink 46

“Slavoj Žižek on Jacques-Alain Miller, "The only absolute pedagogical genius that" he knows...”

See also

Zizek's Sigmund Freud Lecture: Theology, Negativity, and the Death-Drive

"You are allowed not to enjoy": Psychoanalysis today according to Zizek

Concept and Form: Selections from Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–69)

First systematic presentation and assessment of the groundbreaking journal Cahiers pour l’Analyse

Concept and Form is a two-volume monument to the work of the philosophy journal the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (1966–69), the most ambitious and radical collective project to emerge from French structuralism. Inspired by their teachers Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, the editors of the Cahiers sought to sever philosophy from the interpretation of given meanings or experiences, focusing instead on the mechanisms that structure specific configurations of discourse, from the psychological and ideological to the literary, scientific, and political. Adequate analysis of the operations at work in these configurations, they argue, helps prepare the way for their revolutionary transformation.

The first volume comprises English translations of some of the most important theoretical texts published in the journal, written by thinkers who would soon be counted among the most inventive and influential of their generation.

The second volume collects newly commissioned essays on the journal, together with recent interviews with people who were either members of its editorial board or associated with its broader theoretical project.

Contributors include Alain Badiou, Étienne Balibar, Edward Baring, Jacques Bouveresse, Yves Duroux, Alain Grosrichard, Peter Hallward, Adrian Johnston, Serge Leclaire, Patrice Maniglier, Tracy McNulty, Jacques-Alain Miller, Jean-Claude Milner, Knox Peden, Jacques Rancière, François Regnault, and Slavoj Žižek.

Buy Concept and Form here.

Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Paris Seminars in English

Buy Reading Seminar XI: Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis here.

This book provides the first truly sustained commentary to appear in either French or English on Lacan's most important seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. The 16 contributors unpack Lacan's notoriously difficult work in simple terms, and supply elegant illustrations from a variety of fields: psychoanalytic treatment, film, literature, art, and so on. Each of Lacan's fundamental concepts--the unconscious, transference, drive, and repetition--is discussed in detail, and related to other important notions such as object a cause of desire, the gaze, the Name-of-the-Father, the subject, and the Other. This volume also includes a translation of Lacan's companion piece to Seminar XI, "Position of the Unconscious" (an article from the French edition of the Ecrits that has never before appeared in English), by one of the foremost translators of Lacan's work, Bruce Fink. As an indication of the important of this article, Lacan considered it to be the sequel to his "Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," arguably his most important paper in the 1950s.

The contributors include many of the best minds in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today. Chapters include "Excommunication: Context and Concepts" by Jacques-Alain Miller, "The Subject and the Other I and II" by Colette Soler, "Alienation and Separation I and II" by Eric Laurent, "Science and Psychoanalysis" by Bruce Fink, "The Name-of-the-Father" by Francois Regnault, "Transference as Deception" by Pierre-Gilles Gueguen, "The Drive I and II" by Marie-Hele`ne Brousse, "The Demontage of the Drive" by Maire Jaanus, "The Gaze as an Object" by Antonio Quinet, "The Phallic Gaze of Wonderland" by Richard Feldstein, "The 'Evil Eye' of Painting: Jacques Lacan and Witold Gombrowicz on the Gaze" by Hanjo Berressem, "Art and the Position of the Analyst" by Robert Samuels, "The Relation between Voice and the Gaze" by Ellie Ragland, "The Lamella of David Lynch" by Slavoj Zizek, "The Real Cause of Repetition" by Bruce Fink, "Introductory Talk at Sainte-Anne Hospital" by Jacques-Alain Miller, and "The End of Analysis I and II" by Anne Dunand.

Reading Seminars I and II: Lacan's Return to Freud

Buy Reading Seminars I and II here.

In this collection of essays, Lacan's early work is first discussed systematically by focusing on his two earliest seminars: Freud's Papers on Technique and The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. These essays, by some of the finest analysts and writers in the Lacanian psychoanalytic world in Paris today, carefully lay out the background and development of Lacan's thought. In Part I, Jacques-Alain Miller spells out the philosophical and psychiatric origins of Lacan's work in great detail. In Parts II, III, and IV, Colette Soler, Eric Laurent, and others explain in the clearest of fashions the highly influential conceptualization Lacan introduces with the terms "symbolic" "imaginary" and "real" Part V provides the first sustained account in English to date of Lacan's reformulation of psychoanalytic diagnostic categories-neurosis, perversion, psychosis, and their subcategories-their theoretical foundations, and clinical applications (ample case material is provided here)

Jacques Lacan: The Triumph of Religion

Buy The Triumph of Religion here.

"I am the product of priests", Lacan once said of himself. Educated by the Marist Brothers (or Little Brothers of Mary), he was a pious child and acquired considerable, personal knowledge of the torments and cunning of Christian spirituality. He was wonderfully able to speak to Catholics and to bring them around to psychoanalysis. Jesuits flocked to his school.

Freud, an old-style Enlightenment optimist, believed religion was merely an illusion that the progress of the scientific spirit would dissipate in the future. Lacan did not share this belief in the slightest: he thought, on the contrary, that the true religion, Roman Catholicism, would take in everyone in the end, pouring bucketsful of meaning over the ever more insistent and unbearable real that we, in our times, owe to science.

- Jacques-Alain Miller


Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. His many works include Écrits, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis and the many other volumes of The Seminars.

Table of Contents
Note by Jacques-Alain Miller
Discourse to Catholics
Lecture Announcement
I. Regarding Morality, Freud Has What It Takes
II. Can Psychoanalysis Constitute the Kind of Ethics Necessitated by our Times?
The Triumph of Religion
I. Governing, Educating, and Analyzing
II. The Anxiety of Scientists
III. The Triumph of Religion
IV. Closing in on the Symptom
V. The Word Brings Jouissance
VI. Getting Used to the Real
VII. Not Philosophizing
Translator’s Notes
Bibliographical Information

• Jacques Lacan was one of the leading thinkers of the 20th Century and the most influential psychoanalyst after Freud. His work has been hugely influential across a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and psychology to literary theory, critical theory, gender studies and cultural studies.

• In this short book Lacan develops his views on religion, which played an important role in his life and in the development of his ideas - ‘I am the product of priests’, he once said of himself.

• Whereas Freud believed religion was an illusion that would be dissipated by the progress of science, Lacan took the opposite view, arguing that Catholicism - the true religion in his view- would take in everyone in the end.

• This important book, now available for the first time in English, will be of great interest to students and scholars in psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary theory, gender studies, philosophy and the humanities and social sciences generally.

Buy The Triumph of Religion here.

See also

 Lacan For Beginners

Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

Jacques Lacan: On the Names-of-the-Father

Buy On the Names-of-the-Father here.

What astonishing success the Name-of-the-Father has had! Everyone finds something in it. Who one's father is isn't immediately obvious, hardly being visible to the naked eye. Paternity is first and foremost determined by one's culture. As Lacan said, "The Name-of-the-Father creates the function of the father." But then where does the plural stem from?

It isn't pagan, for it is found in the Bible. He who speaks from the burning bush says of Himself that He doesn't have just one Name. In other words, the Father has no proper Name. It is not a figure of speech, but rather a function. The Father has as many names as the function has props.

What is its function? The religious function par excellence, that of tying things together. What things? The signifier and the signified, law and desire, thought and the body. In short, the symbolic and the imaginary. Yet if these two become tied to the real in a three-part knot, the Name-of-the-Father is no longer anything but mere semblance. On the other hand, if without it everything falls apart, it is the symptom of a failed knotting.

- Jacques-Alain Miller

The Freudian Father's Day Gift Guide

Table of Contents
Foreword by Jacques-Alain Miller
The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real
Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father
Bio-bibliographical Notes
Translator’s Notes

• Jacques Lacan was one of the leading thinkers of the 20th Century and the most influential psychoanalyst after Freud. His work has been hugely influential across a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and psychology to literary theory, critical theory, gender studies and cultural studies.

• This is one of Lacan’s most famous and influential works and it is crucial for understanding the development of his thinking.

• The book is comprised of two key texts that were decisive in the making of Jacques Lacan - one which introduces for the first time his key concepts of the symbolic, the imaginary and the real, and another which he wrote just at the moment when he split off from mainstream psychoanalysis.

• This important new book, now available for the first time in English, will be of great interest to students and scholars in scholars in psychoanalysis, critical theory, literary theory, gender studies, philosophy and the humanities and social sciences generally.

Buy On the Names-of-the-Father here. 

See also

 Lacan For Beginners

Introducing Lacan: A Graphic Guide

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis

Jacques Lacan's writings, and especially the seminars for which he has become famous, offer a controversial, radical reappraisal of the legacy bequeathed by Freud.

Buy The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis here.

This volume is based on a year's seminar in which Dr. Lacan addressed a larger, less specialized audience than ever before, among whom he could not assume familiarity with his work. For his listeners then, and for his readers now, he wanted to "introduce a certain coherence into the major concepts on which psycho-analysis is based," namely, the unconscious, repetition, the transference, and the drive. Along the way he argues for a structural affinity between psychoanalysis and language, discusses the relation of psychoanalysis to religion, and reveals his particular stance on topics ranging from sexuality and death to alienation and repression. This book constitutes the essence of Dr. Lacan's sensibility.

See also Lacan For Beginners

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique

Buy Freud's Papers on Technique here.

A complete translation of the seminar that Jacques Lacan gave in the course of a year's teaching within the training programme of the Société Française de Psychanalyse.

The French text was prepared by Jacques-Alain Miller in consultation with Jacques Lacan, from the transcriptions of the seminar.