Autres écrits

Écrits (1966) collected the texts Lacan chose to represent his teaching up to that point, organized around the primacy of the signifier and the unconscious as pure logic. Autres écrits gathers nearly fifty texts from the 1930s to 1980 that were not included in Écrits—early psychiatric writings, interventions, prefaces, and late pieces such as 'Lituraterre' and 'Television' . The second collection was compiled by Jacques-Alain Miller for the centenary of Lacan's birth in 2001, and its prologue by Miller frames the volume as a necessary supplement: what Écrits left out was, precisely, the dimension of jouissance . The collection follows a chronological order, allowing readers to trace the development of Lacan's thought beyond the Écrits' selective canon.

Miller's prologue and the publisher's description emphasize a specific advance: where Écrits taught that the unconscious is a matter of pure logic—the logic of the signifier—Autres écrits teaches that jouissance, too, is structured by the signifier, but at its joint with the living body . Jouissance is produced not by genetic programming but by linguistic manipulations that traumatize the speaking being. From this follow several theorems: jouissance is cynical in itself and condescends to desire only through love; it obstructs any programming of the sexual relation; feminine jouissance refuses the universal and accords with the infinite; phallic jouissance is 'outside-body' . These formulations, Miller suggests, are unprecedented in psychoanalysis and constitute the volume's distinctive theoretical yield.

The collection remains untranslated as a complete volume in English, though many individual pieces are available in various journals and edited collections . The consequence has been a significant asymmetry in Anglophone Lacanian scholarship: readers of French have access to the full chronological arc of Lacan's scattered writings, while English readers encounter them piecemeal, often without the contextual placement that the collection provides. A commentary series, Reading Lacan's Autres Écrits, edited by Calum Neill, Derek Hook, and Stijn Vanheule, began publication in 2026 to address this gap, with its first volume covering the prologue, 'Lituraterre,' and the early texts of the 1930s and 1940s . The series explicitly aims to support Anglophone readers in accessing many of Lacan's less well-known texts .

The volume is organized into eight sections, following a structure that mirrors Écrits . Section I contains Miller's prologue and Lacan's 'Lituraterre,' a late piece on writing and literary creation that functions as a conceptual frame for the collection as a whole . Section II gathers early texts from the 1930s and 1940s, including 'Les complexes familiaux dans la formation de l'individu' (1938) and 'La psychiatrie anglaise et la guerre' (1947) . Later sections include the 'Discours de Rome' (1953), texts on the École freudienne de Paris such as the 'Acte de fondation' (1964) and the 'Lettre de dissolution' (1980), and late pieces including 'Télévision,' 'Radiofonie,' and 'Joyce le Symptôme' . Reviewers have singled out 'Les complexes familiaux' as a capital early text and 'Télévision' as a key late statement .

At the 2012 Buenos Aires presentation of the Spanish translation, translator Graciela Esperanza spoke directly about the effects of translation—the 'effect of strangeness' that Lacan's text preserves despite innumerable corrections. She emphasized Lacan's own references to the position of the translator and concluded that translation confronts one with 'the untranslatable within the work of translating' and 'the impossible to translate' . A review of the Spanish edition in the journal Exlibris similarly noted that the translation's literalism sometimes exceeds what Lacan's own text warrants, producing a 'will to literalness' that can distort as much as clarify . The Spanish case is instructive for the Anglophone situation: it shows that the translation of Lacan's scattered late texts is not a neutral transmission but an interpretive act with its own symptomatic effects.

'Lituraterre,' published in 1971 in a literary review, considers the function of writing and literary creation. Placing it at the head of the collection, immediately after Miller's prologue, gives it a programmatic role: it provides a conceptual framework for understanding Autres écrits as a collection of written works, distinct from the seminars . The title itself is a pun—litura (erasure) and terre (earth)—and the text engages with Lacan's visit to Japan via Siberia, meditating on the relation between writing, the signifier, and the living being. One scholarly review cites its formulation that an asceticism of writing can only pass through reaching a 'c'est écrit' from which the sexual relation would be instituted . The essay thus announces the volume's central concern: the junction of the signifier and the body.