The Lacan Study Group returns in January, reading (in English translation) selections from Lacan’s writings called the “Écrits.”
This reading group meets every two or three weeks, on a Sunday mid-afternoon for about two hours. Generally, we meet at Knight House (address above!), which has been kind enough to host us; some years, by May, we have been a smaller group and have met at a Columbus area coffee house.
The biweekly readings are generally assigned as 10-15 pages. Sometimes we make it all the way through the scheduled reading; often we do not, and so have a shorter reading for the following session.
Past participants have included a mix of faculty, graduate students, and members of the community, from comp-studies, women’s studies, English, philosophy, ethnomusicology, and psychology.
This coming year, between January and May, our readings will start with two early pieces, the first on “The Mirror Stage,” the second “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” with later readings likely to include Lacan’s “Seminar on The Purloined Letter, his “Kant With Sade,” and several later Écrits available in "bootleg" translations to be provided for free.
As it so happens, there are two commonly available English versions of the Écrits, both from Norton Press: one early translation by Alan Sheridan (Écrits: A Selection) and one more recent translation by Bruce Fink (Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English). Either translation will be fine for our purposes, though the Fink would be especially fine, if I may put it that way. A couple of our expected readings this year were omitted in Sheridan’s 1976 selection, but it will be a trivial matter to make photocopies for those who have only the Écrits: Selection. Whatever the case, our first two readings (Mirror Stage and Aggressiveness) are present in all translations. Fink’s translation of the [Complete] Écrits is available here for under $20 from earth’s biggest bookstore--a bargain price to pay for a fount of truth that will confound your enemies and astound your friends!
