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. Where the Turkish original discussed the Turkish vocabulary of Lacanian theory, the passage has been kept and marked as such.

[…] mener le lecteur à une conséquence où il lui faille mettre du sien.

Jacques Lacan, “Ouverture de ce recueil”, Écrits (1966)

I

Lacan’s most widely read books are books he did not write. The sentence sounds like a paradox, but it states a fact. The seminar that began in the autumn of 1953 at the Sainte-Anne hospital and ended in 1980 with the dissolution of the École freudienne de Paris was speech addressed to a community of listeners, open to improvisation, to interruption, to return. Lacan did not put this speech into writing himself. The text of the seminar rested on a scattered body of material: notes taken by stenographers and, in later years, tape recordings and the notes of listeners. The volumes that stand on our shelves today are the “established” form of this material, the work of an editor Lacan himself appointed, Jacques-Alain Miller. The French formula on every cover, texte établi par Jacques-Alain Miller, quietly tells the reader what is in his hands: not a transcription, but an establishment.

The history of the Seminar’s publication in this form is itself a chapter in the history of Lacan’s reception. The first volume, the eleventh seminar, given in 1964 at the École normale supérieure and since known as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, appeared in 1973. It was followed in 1975 by the first seminar, on Freud’s papers on technique, and by the twentieth, Encore. Then came the second (1978), the third (1981), the seventh (1986), the eighth and the seventeenth (1991), the fourth (1994) and the fifth (1998). More than twenty years after Lacan’s death, in the 2000s, the tenth seminar, L’angoisse (2004), the twenty-third, Le sinthome (2005), and the sixteenth and eighteenth (2006) were published; the nineteenth, ...ou pire, followed in 2011, and the sixth, Le désir et son interprétation, in 2013. A decade of silence ensued, and it was broken with unexpected speed: early in 2023 the fourteenth seminar, La logique du fantasme, appeared together with Premiers écrits, which collects Lacan’s pre-war writings; it was followed by the fifteenth, L’acte psychanalytique, in 2024, the twelfth, Problèmes cruciaux pour la psychanalyse, in 2025, and, on 23 January 2026, the thirteenth, L’objet de la psychanalyse.1 This sequence is the product not of chronology but of a publishing policy, and of judgements about what was urgent in a teaching at different moments. Generations who read Lacan in English, in Spanish or in Turkish came to his thought in this irregular order, often learning the problems of the late period before the concepts of the early one.

II

For Lacan, the passage from speech to writing was never a neutral operation. To see why, one must return to 1966, the year of Écrits, the one major book that came from his own hand. Looking back, the year appears as a threshold at which French thought condensed. Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses appeared that spring; in October, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, at the conference later remembered as “the structuralist controversy”, Lacan and Derrida spoke from the same platform.2 Published by Seuil in November 1966, Écrits was a dense book of some nine hundred pages, impassable to most readers; yet it met with unexpected interest, and introduced Lacan as a thinker beyond the circles of psychoanalysis.

The opening text of Écrits, “Ouverture de ce recueil”, asks this essay’s question in its own terms. Recalling Buffon’s dictum that style is the man himself, Lacan proposes to lengthen the formula: style is the man to whom one addresses oneself. He states plainly what he expects of his reader: these writings are meant to lead the reader to a consequence in which he must put in something of his own. My epigraph comes from that passage.3 This corrects a common misconception about Lacan’s difficulty. His text is not difficult because it holds the secret of a meaning hidden from the reader; it is difficult because it includes the reader’s position, the way he reads, in the reading itself. The text tries to carry into writing the structure of a speech that bears transference. The reader is not a spectator outside that structure, but one of its terms.

In this respect the passage of the Seminar into writing raises a question different from that of the style of Écrits. The Écrits are texts that took shape in Lacan’s own hands, corrected, at times rewritten years later. The Seminar is speech; it depends on the presence of an audience, on the mood of the day, on Lacan’s answers to questions, on his anger and his jokes. Every decision that turns this speech into a book, punctuation, paragraphs, chapter titles, how to fill an inaudible passage, is a decision of interpretation. Miller defended the principles of these decisions openly in a 1985 conversation with François Ansermet: the aim was not to reproduce the speech itself, with its repetitions and hesitations, but to establish a readable text of it.4 Lacan had approved this work in his lifetime, and with the afterword he appended to the eleventh seminar he set a kind of signature on the establishment. In it he names “transcription” as a word he discovered thanks to Miller’s modesty, and says that what is read passes through writing while remaining unscathed by it. Here Lacan distinguishes writing, as something that is not read, from transcription.5

III

The work of establishment also has a counter-history. During Lacan’s lifetime and after his death, the stenographic notes of the seminars circulated among his listeners; they were photocopied, distributed lesson by lesson, at times corrected and rewritten by study groups. Some of this work, such as the text prepared for the eighth seminar, Le transfert, by a transcription group called Stécriture, is still read today against the official edition. The authority of the established text and the legitimacy of these parallel texts were for a long time the subject of bitter disputes among Lacan’s pupils. After his death, some of the institutions born of the École freudienne, notably the Association lacanienne internationale around Charles Melman, published a large part of the seminars for their own members in editions that never entered commercial circulation. With the spread of the internet, sites such as Staferla made texts based on the stenographic notes and on various transcriptions available to all, while other sources, such as Patrick Valas’s website, opened access to the sound recordings.

A researcher doing serious work on Lacan today thus faces more than one text of the same seminar. Even in an officially published seminar, the differences between the established text and the stenography are at times decisive for interpretation: an omitted sentence, a corrected matheme, the order of a question and its answer, the shape of a drawing. For the seminars not yet published as books, the ninth, L’identification, for instance, the twenty-first, Les non-dupes errent, or the topological seminars of the last years, Le moment de conclure and La topologie et le temps, the researcher has only these parallel texts. As of 2026, twenty of the twenty-seven seminars have appeared as books in French; of the remaining seven, three, the twenty-second, the twenty-fourth and the twenty-seventh, can be read only in the pages of a journal, in the form Miller established.6 This is more than a philological detail; it is a problem of method in Lacan studies. Anyone trying to write the history of a concept, reading, say, the lessons of 1961–1962 in which identification is rethought through the trait unaire, the unary trait, must state which text he is reading, what it rests on, and at which points it departs from the others.

The problem multiplies in translation. In English, some of the seminars were published by Norton, beginning with the eleventh, translated by Alan Sheridan in 1977; John Forrester (Book I), Sylvana Tomaselli (Book II), Russell Grigg (Books III and XVII), Dennis Porter (Book VII) and Bruce Fink (Book XX) translated these volumes. Since 2014 new translations have been published by Polity: those of A. R. Price (Books IV, X, XIV, XIX and XXIII), of Russell Grigg (Book V) and of Bruce Fink (Books VI, VIII, XVI and XVIII). The English Book XIV appeared in the spring of 2026; the translation of Book XV was announced for the autumn of the same year. In 2025 Grigg also brought Premiers écrits into English as First Writings. The complete English translation of Écrits came almost thirty years after Sheridan’s 1977 selection, in Fink’s translation of 2006, which gives the pagination of the French edition in its margins and so lets the reader move between the texts.7 Every translation inherits the decisions of the established text and adds its own. Leaving jouissance untranslated, writing the Real with a capital letter or without, rendering signifiant with a settled term or a new word: these are decisions that determine how Lacan will be thought in a given language. In Turkish, the language in which this essay was first written, many of these decisions have yet to be made; on the Turkish pages of this site, choices such as gösteren for the signifier, jouissance left untranslated and Büyük Başka for the big Other are choices made within that open debate.

IV

Lacan himself lived the problem of his speech passing into writing at first hand, and carried it into his theory. The concept of the “matheme”, developed at the start of the 1970s, can be read as a response. In Encore Lacan defines mathematical formalisation as the aim and the ideal of psychoanalysis, and gives his reason: only the matheme can be transmitted integrally.8 The four places of the discourses, the formulas of sexuation, the formula of fantasy ($ ◇ a): these are attempts to establish the fixity of writing against the flow of Lacan’s speech, open to interpretation and prone to dispersal. But Lacan also says, in the same lesson, that the matheme does not speak by itself, that it can be transmitted only within speech, within a teaching. Writing does not take the place of speech; it is a shore at the edge of speech, trying to hold what speech lets slip.

This thought finds its most concentrated expression in “Lituraterre”, written in 1971. Flying back from Japan over the Siberian plain, looking at the traces of streams visible between the clouds, Lacan thinks of the letter, of writing, not as the bearer of a meaning but as a shore, a line, a border between knowledge and jouissance.9 Seen from this angle, the established text of the Seminar is a kind of “lituraterre”: a writing redrawn, erased and corrected over the trace left by speech. It is possible neither to trust this writing entirely nor to reject it as a betrayal of speech. What the reader can do is read while keeping in mind the double nature of the text, the gap between the trace of speech and the decision of the establishment.

V

Why this gap matters so much is best seen through an example. On 15 January 1964 Lacan opened his first lesson at the École normale supérieure by speaking of the decision of the International Psychoanalytical Association that had struck him from the list of training analysts, and compared it to the excommunication, the herem, pronounced against Spinoza by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656.10 In the book this scene reads less like the opening of a seminar than like the preamble to a manifesto. Yet that day Lacan faced a new audience, come to the École normale at Althusser’s invitation and including young students of philosophy. Jacques-Alain Miller was one of them. The man who would establish the text of the seminar was seated among the listeners of the scene the text records. A year later, on 24 February 1965, Miller’s presentation at the seminar, “La suture”, proposed a reading of the logic of the signifier starting from Frege’s theory of number; it was published in 1966 in the first issue of Cahiers pour l’analyse.

I recall these details not to question the legitimacy of a person or an institution. On the contrary: the establishment of the Seminar is a concrete answer to the question of how Lacan’s teaching can be transmitted, and that answer carries within it a reading, an interpretation. The text Miller established arranges Lacan’s speech so as to make its conceptual structure visible: chapter titles, subheadings, at times divisions that show the stages of an argument within a lesson. This arrangement gives the reader a map, but it also traces a direction. The stenography, by contrast, is a terrain without a map; it is full of repetitions, unfinished sentences and inaudible passages, and it asks the reader to find his own way. The difference between the two texts is, in a sense, the difference between two ethics of reading.

VI

In 2026, forty-five years after Lacan’s death, the conditions of this debate have changed profoundly. The digital availability of recordings, stenographic notes and various transcriptions has freed the reading of Lacan from dependence on a single text. A researcher today can set side by side the established text of a lesson, its stenography and, at times, its recording. This has given rise to a field that might be called Lacanian philology: studies that try to reconstruct in which lesson, and in which words, a concept first appeared, how a formula was drawn on the board, to which question an answer was given. Their value lies less in restoring Lacan’s thought to its “authentic” text than in showing that this thought was a process, an essay, at times an error and a correction.

But the new situation carries its own dangers. The multiplication of texts can easily turn into a vacuum of authority. Lacan’s speech, in whoever’s hands, circulates together with the reading of the one who puts it into circulation; no transcription is innocent. A return to the stenography sometimes, instead of freeing us from the decisions of the established text, makes other decisions invisible. The question Lacan studies face today is therefore less “which text is correct?” than “which reading does each text make possible, and which does it close off?”. This question is a direct extension of Lacan’s own teaching: that the signifier never fully determines meaning, that every reading is an interpretation, and every interpretation a cut.

The psychoanalytic clinic knows what this question means by another route. In analysis, speech is not put into writing; the analyst does not take notes of what the analysand says or turn it into a text. Interpretation takes place within speech, by intervening at a moment of it. What remains of an analysis is not a text but a change in the subject’s way of saying. The passage of Lacan’s seminar into writing thus carries a paradox about this clinical experience itself: a teaching that wishes to transmit the effect of a speech must put that speech into writing at the price of losing it. Lacan’s offering of the matheme as a solution, the presentation of the established text as a map for reading, and the circulation of the stenography as a trace are three different ways of living with this paradox.

VII

In the sixtieth year of Écrits and the hundred and twenty-fifth since Lacan’s birth, whoever looks at his work faces an unfinished oeuvre. This incompleteness is not a flaw; it is the nature of the work. Lacan’s teaching did not proceed as a closed system, but as a speech that began again every year, questioned its own earlier formulas and was rewritten the year after. That some of the seminars are still unpublished as books is a reminder that this speech is still in the process of becoming writing, and that the process unfolds within a tense relation between an institution, an editor and a community of readers.

To read Lacan is therefore less to read a text than to enter a transference. The reader enters into a relation with Lacan’s speech, with the hand that put it into writing, and with the translator who re-establishes that writing in his own language. What is asked of the reader in this relation is what Lacan said in his opening text: to put in something of his own, to bring his reading into the text, and to take responsibility for doing so. To state which edition, which transcription of a seminar one is quoting, to look for the place where a concept first appears, to question a translator’s decision: these are the most modest, but the most necessary, forms of that responsibility. Lacan’s teaching asks those who read it to read not only the text that carries his speech, but how that text was established.

Notes

  1. The volumes were published in Paris by Seuil in the series Le Champ freudien, directed by Miller; the sixth seminar is the exception, printed in 2013 by Éditions de La Martinière in partnership with Le Champ freudien. That the order of publication lies so far from the order in which the seminars were given has meant that, for decades, readers came to know Lacan in fragments and out of chronological sequence. The appearance of a new volume at the start of each year since 2023 shows the series turning to close its largest gap, the seminars of the École normale years in the mid-1960s. ↩︎
  2. The conference “The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man” was held at Johns Hopkins University from 18 to 21 October 1966. Lacan’s paper appears, under the title “Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever”, in the proceedings edited by R. Macksey and E. Donato (1970). Derrida’s “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” was given at the same meeting. ↩︎
  3. J. Lacan, “Ouverture de ce recueil”, Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966. Buffon’s “Le style est l’homme même”, from his address on admission to the Académie française in 1753, is taken up in the first sentence of Lacan’s opening text. ↩︎
  4. J.-A. Miller, Entretien sur Le Séminaire avec François Ansermet, Paris: Navarin, 1985. ↩︎
  5. J. Lacan, “Postface au Séminaire XI” (1973), first published in the Seuil edition of the eleventh seminar: “Une transcription, voici un mot que je découvre grâce à la modestie de J.-A. M., Jacques-Alain Miller de son nom : ce qui se lit passe à travers l’écriture en y restant indemne.” ↩︎
  6. The twenty-second (R.S.I.) and the twenty-fourth (L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile à mourre) seminars were published in Ornicar?, nos. 2–5 and 12–18 respectively; the lessons of the last seminar, Dissolution (1980), appeared in nos. 20–23 of the same journal. None of them has appeared as a book in the Seuil series. ↩︎
  7. J. Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. B. Fink in collaboration with H. Fink and R. Grigg, New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. ↩︎
  8. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore (1972–1973), ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1975, p. 108. In the same context Lacan stresses that the matheme is transmitted only with the support of language, that is, of speech. ↩︎
  9. J. Lacan, “Lituraterre” (1971), Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001. The title plays on the Latin litura (an erasure, a smudge) and on the French littérature and terre. ↩︎
  10. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964), ed. J.-A. Miller, Paris: Seuil, 1973, lesson of 15 January 1964. The previous year, the seminar Les Noms-du-Père, begun on 20 November 1963, had been broken off after Lacan’s single lesson at Sainte-Anne; that lesson was published separately in 2005 as Des Noms-du-Père. ↩︎

References

  • Lacan, J. (1966). Écrits. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (1970). Of structure as an inmixing of an otherness prerequisite to any subject whatever. In R. Macksey & E. Donato (Eds.), The languages of criticism and the sciences of man: The structuralist controversy. Johns Hopkins University Press.
  • Lacan, J. (1973). Le Séminaire, Livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (1964). Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (1975). Le Séminaire, Livre XX: Encore (1972–1973). Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2001). Autres écrits. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2005). Des Noms-du-Père. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans., with H. Fink & R. Grigg). W. W. Norton.
  • Lacan, J. (2023). Premiers écrits. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2023). Le Séminaire, Livre XIV: La logique du fantasme (1966–1967). Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2026). Le Séminaire, Livre XIII: L’objet de la psychanalyse (1965–1966). Seuil.
  • Miller, J.-A. (1966). La suture: Éléments de la logique du signifiant. Cahiers pour l’analyse, 1.
  • Miller, J.-A. (1985). Entretien sur Le Séminaire avec François Ansermet. Navarin.
  • Roudinesco, E. (1993). Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un système de pensée. Fayard.