Lacan after Lacan: A Map of Contemporary Lacan Studies

This essay first appeared in Turkish. The English version is my own. Lacan’s texts are cited in the French originals; translations of his phrases not otherwise attributed are mine.

I

In July 1980, in Caracas, at a meeting with Latin American analysts who had taken his teaching as their starting point, Lacan told his listeners that it was up to them to be Lacanians if they wished; he himself was a Freudian.¹ The sentence can be read as a gesture of modesty; but it also reads like a forecast of what happened after his death. Lacan founded a school, dissolved it, and left behind a series of traditions bearing his name but drifting ever further apart. One is formed by the schools organised in Paris around Jacques-Alain Miller and joined, since 1992, in the World Association of Psychoanalysis (WAP/AMP). Another consists of the many associations, in France and across Europe, that define themselves outside that line. A third is the tradition rooted in Latin America, above all in Argentina and Brazil, from the 1960s onwards under the impetus of Oscar Masotta, which today forms one of the most vital Lacanian clinics in the world. The fourth has weak ties to the clinic, or none: the readings of Lacan that grew up in the universities of the English-speaking world, within philosophy, literary theory, film studies and political theory.

The most striking consequence of this dispersal is that the same name designates almost different authors in different places. In a Parisian clinic Lacan is above all the theorist of psychosis, of transference and of the end of analysis; in an American university he is a theorist of ideology, a film critic, or a reader of Hegel. These two Lacans rarely meet. In the past twenty years, however, a series of developments has strained this separation: the late teaching, the period of knots and the sinthome in the 1970s, has moved to the centre of both clinic and philosophy; the debates on sexual difference and gender have turned psychoanalysis once more into a public question; and neuroscience and language-processing machines have entered, from a new direction, the field psychoanalysis had long considered its own, language and the subject. This essay tries to follow these developments not as a balance sheet but as open questions.

II

The greatest transformation in Lacan studies is perhaps the rereading of the late period. For a long time Lacan was read as the theorist of the 1950s formula of the unconscious structured like a language, of the Name-of-the-Father and the primacy of the signifier. The seminars of the 1970s, with their Borromean knots and their concepts of lalangue and sinthome, were seen as a strange appendix to this structure, at times as a symptom of old age. From the 1990s onwards the picture was reversed. Over many years Miller’s weekly courses proposed reading Lacan’s last teaching as a correction of his first teaching, at certain points as its repudiation; the expressions “the last Lacan”, even “the very last Lacan”, became the name less of a periodisation than of a theoretical programme.²

The most concrete clinical consequence of this rereading is the concept of “ordinary psychosis”. It took shape in a series of clinical meetings led by Miller, at Angers in 1996, Arcachon in 1997 and Antibes in 1998.³ The classical Lacanian clinic rested on a sharp structural distinction between neurosis and psychosis: the Name-of-the-Father is either inscribed or foreclosed (forclusion). The concept of ordinary psychosis was proposed to think of cases that fall outside this binary, that neither function like a neurosis nor show themselves through noisy symptoms such as delusion or hallucination: subjects whose life, body or social bond has subtly come loose, but who hold together thanks to a fourth ring, a sinthome. The concept is Lacan’s reading of Joyce translated into the clinic.

Its limits are debated as much as its fruitfulness. On the one hand, ordinary psychosis allowed clinicians to recognise silent psychoses missed by psychiatric classification and by the classical structural distinction. On the other, the concept’s steady expansion brought the danger of its becoming a category that explains everything and therefore distinguishes nothing. The work on psychosis of the Belgian psychoanalyst and clinical psychologist Stijn Vanheule is one example of carrying this debate into the language of academic research: Vanheule compares the early and late forms of Lacan’s theory of psychosis in detail and argues that structural diagnosis should be used not as a label but as a hypothesis about a subject’s relation to language.⁴ The open question is this: does the late teaching complete the structural clinic of the first teaching, or replace it? In a clinic in which every symptom is a sinthome and every subject a knot of its own, what does diagnosis mean?

III

Another legacy of the late period is the debate around two concepts Lacan introduced in the 1970s: lalangue and parlêtre. Lalangue is a term Lacan created by fusing the French for “the language”, la langue, into a single word; it designates language not as a system, like the language of linguistics, but as a layer prior to meaning, in which sound, homophony, the infant’s babble and the mother’s speech are charged with jouissance. Parlêtre is the “speaking being”, a fusion of parler and être; Lacan says he proposes the word as a term to replace the unconscious.⁵ In “L’inconscient et le corps parlant”, the text in which he presented the theme of the WAP congress held in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, Miller used these two concepts to define the orientation of psychoanalysis in the twenty-first century: the speaking body in place of the unconscious, the event of jouissance in place of the interpretation of meaning.

This orientation meets the philosophical readings of Lacan at an unexpected point. In L’Œuvre claire, published in 1995, the French linguist and thinker Jean-Claude Milner read Lacan’s work through its relation to science, and in particular to the subject of modern science since Galileo, and distinguished two great successive periods in Lacan’s teaching, a “first classicism” and a “second classicism”.⁶ For Milner, Lacan’s question was always this: within the discourse of modern science, which excludes its own subject, where is the place of the subject? Psychoanalysis, in Lacan’s words, operates on the subject of science.⁷ Against readings that take Lacan as a hermeneutics or a theory of meaning, this thesis places him on the same plane as science, as a discourse that deals with what science leaves out. Some of the most fruitful philosophical debates in Lacan studies today turn on where this line of Milner’s and Miller’s reading of the late period converge, and where they part.

IV

Sexual difference is the question that has drawn Lacan studies most deeply into public debate in the past decade. The formulas of sexuation Lacan wrote in Encore in 1972–1973 define sex not as a biological or social property but as two different logical relations of the subject to the phallic function, that is, to the limit of language. For a long time these formulas were the target of feminist critiques of Lacan. In the 1990s the American theorist Joan Copjec, in Read My Desire, reread them by comparing them to Kant’s antinomies of pure reason: the male and female sides follow the structure of two different failures, the mathematical and the dynamical antinomies; sexual difference is the name of a logical impasse irreducible to the binary of social construction and biological essence.⁸ The Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič took this line further in What Is Sex?, published in 2017: sexuality is the place, in human experience, of an ontological lack, of a crack within being itself.⁹

Set beside the debates on trans experience, these philosophical readings formed one of the most delicate tests of Lacanian theory. A classical Lacanian clinic was at times inclined to read gender transition within the frame of psychosis, as a sign of the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father. The work of the French psychoanalyst Geneviève Morel on intersex and transsexuality, and the books of the Argentine-born psychoanalyst Patricia Gherovici, who practises in the United States, are among the foremost clinical studies that question this reading.¹⁰ Gherovici recalls that the formulas of sexuation do not tie a sex to a body; on the contrary, every subject, whatever its body, must position itself on one side of the formulas or the other; and she proposes reading the transition of some trans subjects as an effort to build a sinthome, a liveable knot, like Joyce’s writing. Fabrice Bourlez’s Queer Psychoanalysis, published in English in 2026, reopens the same question through the encounter between psychoanalysis and queer theory, the writings of Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Paul B. Preciado, and proposes a “minor clinic”.¹¹ That the fifteenth congress of the World Association of Psychoanalysis, held in May 2026, took its theme from Lacan’s most disputed formula, the proposition that “there is no sexual relation”, also shows how far the question has moved to the centre of the Lacanian clinic. The debate is not closed. But it is now widely accepted that Lacan’s formulas, precisely because they do not coincide with biological sex, offer a more flexible language for today’s questions than classical Freudian theory.

V

Lacan’s rise in political theory took place from the late 1980s along two different lines. On one side, the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe placed Lacan’s concept of the quilting point (point de capiton) at the centre of a theory of hegemony: social identities are constituted in a struggle that can never be completed, around nodal points that provisionally fix meaning and around the terms Laclau, in later writings, called “empty signifiers”.¹² On the other, Slavoj Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology, published in 1989, read Lacan together with Hegel and Marx to argue that ideology is not a false consciousness but a fantasy that structures reality itself. The line known as the Ljubljana school, with Mladen Dolar, Alenka Zupančič and researchers of a younger generation, turned Lacan into a philosophical reference on a world scale.

One of the most debated concepts of these political readings today is the “capitalist discourse”, which Lacan put forward in a lecture in Milan on 12 May 1972. Lacan adds a fifth to the structure of the four discourses: in the capitalist discourse the divided subject appears to take the place of the master signifier, and the four terms of the discourse turn in an uninterrupted circuit, without being cut, as in the other discourses, by an impossibility.¹³ The formula has been used to think of the structure of consumer society, which promises to fill every lack with an object and so tries to abolish lack itself, and with it the condition of desire. Samo Tomšič’s The Capitalist Unconscious turned this debate into a systematic comparison between Marx’s theory of value and Lacan’s theory of the signifier.¹⁴ The open question is whether the formula is a theory or a diagnosis: how much weight can a structure Lacan set out in a single lecture, with a drawing on the board, bear for thinking contemporary capitalism as a whole?

VI

The relation of psychoanalysis to science, as central as it was to Lacan’s own teaching, is also one of the most strained areas of Lacan studies today. In France, the mid-2000s were a period in which this strain became a public conflict. Le Livre noir de la psychanalyse, published in 2005, gathered criticisms of the scientific foundations and therapeutic efficacy of psychoanalysis; L’Anti-Livre noir de la psychanalyse, edited by Miller, replied a year later. In 2012 the French National Authority for Health (HAS), in its recommendations on autism, classed psychoanalytic approaches among the approaches on which there was “no consensus”. These debates left the Lacanian clinic having to defend its efficacy in a language other than its own, the language of evidence-based medicine.

In the same years, however, a dialogue between psychoanalysis and neuroscience also began that did not rest on mutual reduction. À chacun son cerveau, published in 2004 by the Swiss psychoanalyst François Ansermet and the neuroscientist Pierre Magistretti, started from the concept of synaptic plasticity to argue that the traces experience leaves in the brain are a process that makes each individual singular; here neuroscience stood not to refute psychoanalysis’s claim to singularity but to support it.¹⁵ The joint book of the American philosopher Adrian Johnston and the French philosopher Catherine Malabou took up the same question on a philosophical plane, through affect and the body.¹⁶ The common question of these works is this: what relation can be thought between the materiality of the signifier and the materiality of the brain? Is Lacan’s insistence that the signifier is “material” a metaphor, or a thesis that could build a bridge to the processes neuroscience describes today?

VII

This question takes its most striking form today in speaking machines. On 22 June 1955, in his second seminar, Lacan gave a lesson entitled “Psychoanalysis and cybernetics, or on the nature of language”. In it he argued that cybernetics, the language of machines operating on binary codes, offers a model for understanding the situation of the human subject before language: the symbolic order is a machine that operates by its own law, independently of the subjects who use it.¹⁷ In The Freudian Robot, the Chinese-born American literary and media theorist Lydia H. Liu related this cybernetic interest of Lacan’s to Claude Shannon’s information theory and to research on the statistical structure of printed English, and showed the forgotten place of psychoanalysis in the intellectual history of digital media.¹⁸ Isabel Millar, for her part, proposed thinking of artificial intelligence with Lacanian concepts, through sexual difference, jouissance and disembodied speech.¹⁹

The arrival of large language models has turned this debate from a theoretical curiosity into a clinical question. These models seem a kind of realisation of Lacan’s idea that language can operate like a machine, as a subjectless concatenation: speech produced without “understanding” meaning, in which one signifier follows another according to a statistical probability. But a Lacanian view also shows at once what is missing here. For Lacan the speaking being is not a user of language but a subject divided by language, in whom language has opened a wound; this division is lived in the body as jouissance. The machine’s speech is tied to no body, no lack, no desire. The question, then, is this: if language can speak without a subject, what does it mean for psychoanalysis to define the subject as an effect of language? And for an analyst some of whose analysands now speak with a machine every day, how should concepts such as transference, the subject supposed to know and the address of speech be rethought? These questions are likely to be among those that occupy Lacan studies most in the coming decade.

VIII

Another line that has become distinct in Lacan studies over the past decade is the question of race and colonialism. Its first trace in Lacanian thought is found not in Lacan himself but in Frantz Fanon. In Peau noire, masques blancs, published in 1952, Fanon turns to Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage in a long footnote and questions the place at which the imaginary unity of the white subject constitutes the black body as an other, a stranger.²⁰ Long almost silent within Lacanian theory, the question has been reopened in recent years. The work of the American literary theorist Sheldon George on African American racial identity, and the volume Lacan and Race, which George edited with the South African psychologist and theorist Derek Hook, proposed thinking of racism not as a prejudice or a piece of misinformation but as a regulation of jouissance, a hostility to the jouissance of the other.²¹

This line finds a limited but important support in Lacan’s own texts. In passages from the early 1970s in which he says he foresaw the rise of racism, Lacan ties that rise to the intolerability of the other’s jouissance, of the other’s enjoying in a different way.²² In an age of rising identity politics and hostility to migration, this insight may be one of Lacanian theory’s most direct contributions to public debate. But it also requires Lacanian theory to question its own history, its Eurocentric sources and the voices its institutions have left out.

IX

Autism is the field in which the Lacanian clinic has been both most criticised and most original. The harshness of the French debate has at times made this work invisible. Jean-Claude Maleval’s L’autiste et sa voix proposed thinking of autism not as a form of psychosis but as a structure of its own, through the subject’s refusal to give his voice, his own speech; it described a clinical approach that supports the autistic subject in building a bond with the world through his own inventions, his “double”, his objects and his areas of interest.²³ In treating the autistic subject not as the bearer of a deficit or a disorder but as a subject who invents his own solutions, this approach converges unexpectedly with some of the demands of the autism rights movement.

X

Looking at this map as a whole, one sees Lacan studies pulled today by two opposing forces. On one side, Lacan has become, independently of his clinic and even of psychoanalysis, a general vocabulary of philosophy, political theory and cultural criticism. Terms such as “the big Other”, “jouissance” and “objet petit a” circulate cut off from the clinical context that gave rise to them, at times almost like slang. On the other side, the Lacanian clinic develops within its own institutions, far from this general vocabulary, a language and a system of transmission of its own; but this language reaches less and less beyond the institutions, into the university and public debate.

The future of Lacan studies may depend on whether these two worlds, the clinic and the university, can speak to each other again. The philological rigour I discussed in the previous essay, an awareness of the texts and decisions through which Lacan’s speech has reached us, is a precondition for this. But it is not enough on its own. Lacan’s concepts keep the weight of the problem that gave rise to them only when they are thought from within a clinical experience, from within the practice of listening to a subject’s speech. This is perhaps what philosophy can learn from Lacan: that the concept is born where speech is listened to. What the clinic can learn from philosophy is that its concepts must be open to testing, debate and refutation outside the transference within the institution as well.

Read in this light, the sentence Lacan spoke in Caracas is also a warning. To be Lacanian carries the danger of turning a teaching into an identity, a vocabulary into a badge of belonging. To be Freudian, in the sense Lacan gave it, is to remain faithful to what Freud found: the discovery that the unconscious shows itself in the break of a speech, in a slip, in a symptom. Each of the questions Lacan studies face today, from ordinary psychosis to speaking machines, from sexual difference to the capitalist discourse, is a different form of the question of how to remain faithful to that discovery.

Notes

1. Lacan’s address of 12 July 1980 in Caracas was published as “Le Séminaire de Caracas” in the first issue of L’Âne (March–April 1981), and later in the Almanach de la dissolution (Paris: Navarin, 1986). The meeting took place a few months after Lacan had dissolved the École freudienne de Paris at the beginning of the same year. ↩︎
2. This reading was developed in Miller’s courses “L’orientation lacanienne”, in particular in the 2006–2007 course “Le tout dernier Lacan” and in the course he gave in 2011, later known as “L’Un tout seul”. A large part of these courses has been printed only in journals and in institutional publications. ↩︎
3. J.-A. Miller et al., La psychose ordinaire: La Convention d’Antibes, Paris: Agalma / Seuil, 1999. The proceedings of the two earlier meetings were published as Le Conciliabule d’Angers: Effets de surprise dans les psychoses (1997) and La Conversation d’Arcachon: Cas rares, les inclassables de la clinique (1997). ↩︎
4. S. Vanheule, The Subject of Psychosis: A Lacanian Perspective, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ↩︎
5. J. Lacan, “Joyce le Symptôme” (1975/1979), Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001. In this text Lacan says he proposes to substitute the parlêtre for Freud’s unconscious. ↩︎
6. J.-C. Milner, L’Œuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie, Paris: Seuil, 1995. ↩︎
7. J. Lacan, “La science et la vérité” (1965), Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966. Lacan says here that the subject on which psychoanalysis operates can only be the subject of science. ↩︎
8. J. Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, especially the chapter “Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason”. ↩︎
9. A. Zupančič, What Is Sex?, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. ↩︎
10. G. Morel, Ambiguïtés sexuelles: Sexuation et psychose, Paris: Anthropos, 2000; P. Gherovici, Please Select Your Gender: From the Invention of Hysteria to the Democratizing of Transgenderism, New York: Routledge, 2010; P. Gherovici, Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference, New York: Routledge, 2017. ↩︎
11. F. Bourlez, Queer psychanalyse: Clinique mineure et déconstruction du genre, Paris: Hermann, 2018; in English as Queer Psychoanalysis: Minor Clinic and Deconstruction of Gender, London: Routledge, 2026. ↩︎
12. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, London: Verso, 1985. For a systematic assessment of the use of Lacanian concepts in political theory, see Y. Stavrakakis, Lacan and the Political, London: Routledge, 1999. ↩︎
13. J. Lacan, “Du discours psychanalytique”, lecture at the University of Milan, 12 May 1972; published in Lacan in Italia 1953–1978 / En Italie Lacan, Milan: La Salamandra, 1978. ↩︎
14. S. Tomšič, The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan, London: Verso, 2015. A more recent study that questions the limits of this alliance argues that Lacan departs radically from Marxism yet that his political value can be grasped only from within that history, and suggests that the link between Lacan and the critique of capitalism is at times made too easily: M. Maher, Symptom Invented: Lacan and the History of Marxism, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2026. ↩︎
15. F. Ansermet and P. Magistretti, À chacun son cerveau: Plasticité neuronale et inconscient, Paris: Odile Jacob, 2004. ↩︎
16. A. Johnston and C. Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. ↩︎
17. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre II: Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (1954–1955), ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1978, lesson of 22 June 1955. The series of pluses and minuses appended to the “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” of the same year are an attempt to show this self-operating logic of the signifying chain. ↩︎
18. L. H. Liu, The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. ↩︎
19. I. Millar, The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. ↩︎
20. F. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, Paris: Seuil, 1952, chapter six (“Le Nègre et la psychopathologie”). ↩︎
21. S. George, Trauma and Race: A Lacanian Study of African American Racial Identity, Waco: Baylor University Press, 2016; S. George and D. Hook (eds.), Lacan and Race: Racism, Identity, and Psychoanalytic Theory, London: Routledge, 2021. ↩︎
22. Lacan’s most quoted words on the subject are in Télévision, filmed in 1973 (Paris: Seuil, 1974); there, answering a question about the future of racism, Lacan speaks of the inability to leave the other to his own mode of jouissance. ↩︎
23. J.-C. Maleval, L’autiste et sa voix, Paris: Seuil, 2009. For a Lacanian assessment of the French debate, see É. Laurent, La bataille de l’autisme: De la clinique à la politique, Paris: Navarin, 2012. ↩︎

References

• Ansermet, F., & Magistretti, P. (2004). À chacun son cerveau: Plasticité neuronale et inconscient. Odile Jacob.
• Bourlez, F. (2018). Queer psychanalyse: Clinique mineure et déconstruction du genre. Hermann.
• Copjec, J. (1994). Read my desire: Lacan against the historicists. MIT Press.
• Fanon, F. (1952). Peau noire, masques blancs. Seuil.
• George, S. (2016). Trauma and race: A Lacanian study of African American racial identity. Baylor University Press.
• George, S., & Hook, D. (Eds.). (2021). Lacan and race: Racism, identity, and psychoanalytic theory. Routledge.
• Gherovici, P. (2017). Transgender psychoanalysis: A Lacanian perspective on sexual difference. Routledge.
• Johnston, A., & Malabou, C. (2013). Self and emotional life: Philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. Columbia University Press.
• Lacan, J. (1966). La science et la vérité. In Écrits. Seuil.
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• Lacan, J. (1975). Le Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore (1972–1973). Seuil.
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• Laclau, E., & Mouffe, C. (1985). Hegemony and socialist strategy. Verso.
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• Liu, L. H. (2010). The Freudian robot: Digital media and the future of the unconscious. University of Chicago Press.
• Maher, M. (2026). Symptom invented: Lacan and the history of Marxism. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Maleval, J.-C. (2009). L’autiste et sa voix. Seuil.
• Millar, I. (2021). The psychoanalysis of artificial intelligence. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Miller, J.-A., et al. (1999). La psychose ordinaire: La Convention d’Antibes. Agalma / Seuil.
• Milner, J.-C. (1995). L’Œuvre claire: Lacan, la science, la philosophie. Seuil.
• Morel, G. (2000). Ambiguïtés sexuelles: Sexuation et psychose. Anthropos.
• Stavrakakis, Y. (1999). Lacan and the political. Routledge.
• Tomšič, S. (2015). The capitalist unconscious: Marx and Lacan. Verso.
• Vanheule, S. (2011). The subject of psychosis: A Lacanian perspective. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Žižek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. Verso.
• Zupančič, A. (2017). What is sex? MIT Press.